


Waste Isolation

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cults, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Western, M/M, Post-Apocalyptic Future Western AU, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Reluctant Coworkers to Lovers, Yes They Still Have Lightsabers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 03:46:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6888625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Saltlands, Disputed Territory; 9421 CE. As sheriff of the Templum Flats, Hux prides himself on his irrepressible conniving - especially in dealing with the cultish Order and its feral lich mercenary, Ren.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waste Isolation

“Power ever blooming to a center and the center that is here. Power present always and eternal. Power emanation of power energy to the body. The power is to the body and the power is of the body.”

“Power accrued from power of forefathers is inheritance of power. Earth having swallowed power up unto itself is preservation of power.” 

“Power will change the body and imbue the body with power. To touch power is to oneself be power.” 

_ — selections of translation of texts from Templum Flats site into common tongue by last known living Late English reader, approx. 3835 AD _

 

\--

** Saltlands, Disputed Territory **

** 9421 C.E.  **

 

Hux was the sheriff of the Templum Flats by title alone. At twenty-three he had been promoted to the position from deputy after a high-stakes game of cards and its resultant fallout and thus had held it for eleven years during which time there had occurred rather no less crime nor shootouts in the street nor bodies in the dust at dawn but certainly a great deal more business. Those in his constituency knew it and treated him with the modicum of respect they felt he deserved — at least, they did not spit at his feet while he patrolled the open-air markets or drank a black swill of caf with associates at the open-air slum cafes in the manner they had frequently accosted his predecessor. 

His constituency, he was frequently reminded, did not necessarily include the templum high priest Snoke and the trainees of his Order, except when they required from one another a favor of mutually beneficent value. Customarily it was a matter of trade. “Tit for tat,” Phasma, Hux’s clerk, was always saying. Hux doubted his predecessor had understood the nature of the beast and as such in his early days with the sheriff’s department he too had avoided the black Westfacing door into Snoke’s chambers within the templum. The previous sheriff had been a superstitious man in life and had feared the Order and he carried a skeletal rabbit’s foot with him and a satchel of mesquite he would hold to his nose and mouth in the Flats against the sewer smell, the death metallics, the salt and the sand and the ancient decay. Thus it had been rather easy for Hux, himself raised beneath a blue tarp on the South face of the templum, to get one over on him even at such a young age. 

It had come to be as was customary that he needed someone killed in order to placate certain parties and could not order an execution for fear of inquest and as such he was in need of a mercenary. And as such he found himself waiting at the black door for the nth time in order to negotiate with Snoke for the teeth of his wildest rabidest dog. 

“Here for an audience,” he said to the filmy-eyed girl at the door. 

“Do you have an appointment?” 

He showed his badge and held it up for a moment before he realized she couldn't see. “I’m the sheriff.” 

She brought him in through the heavy black portal and inside the hobnails on Hux’s boots clattered loudly upon the milky-black stone floor. In the dark depth of the sanctum the dusky goldenhour light through the Westfacing windows streamed like mineral runs in stone upon Snoke’s dais and the cathedra in which the man himself sat perusing his oracular and flanked as per usual by a beautiful youth of indeterminable gender clad in the ascetic robes of the Order whom Hux had never seen before. 

“Brendol,” Snoke called, half in his mind, echoing in both chambers. He passed the oracular to his servant and as was customary tented his skeletal fingers. The probing touch at Hux’s mind was similarly expected and rerouted; he had spent much time practicing such a skill with his only gifted deputy. 

“Sir.” 

As he drew close to the dais he averted his eyes from Snoke’s as was polite. It was the proper contrition with which to approach high priests of the Order at this or any templum in the saltlands, and there was an element of wishful self-preservation in it too as Snoke himself was no pleasant sight to behold. Though not all with his gift were blessed of aspect Snoke bore a great rift upon his skull and his bare pate was bulbous. If he had other feature remarkable Hux had missed it in his quick glances or erased it from his memory. He watched now at Snoke’s fraying rubber sandals and the nervously shifting feet of the youth to the priest’s left, holding the oracular like one of the sacred texts, head respectfully bowed. Snoke presented his ring, a band of iron soldered to a chunk of yellow stone; Hux shut his eyes, swallowed his nausea, and kissed it. “What brings you here today, sheriff.” 

“What usually does, sir; I’d like to borrow Ren again.” 

“For what task this time?” 

“I need him to see to a weapons trader.” 

“Take heed you do not misrepresent your wishes as needs,” said Snoke. But still he leaned in to whisper something to his attendant who left presently brushing past Hux with the smell of smoke and frankincense. 

“I wish but to maintain the peace in our community,” said Hux lamely. He in fact wished to maintain the local monopoly of another arms dealer with whom he had aligned and in fact slept on occasion (ie. when drunk). 

“I’ve seen your desires.” Snoke coughed. “I can provide Ren for this service given you provide me with another.” 

“Sir?” 

The attendant was back at Hux’s side with a crumpled piece of parchment that was pressed into his hand. A series of runic inscriptions in the common tongue were inscribed in black bone ink: 

LIVING HERE IS KILLING US

Footsteps behind him in the darkened chamber. Hux turned as he rolled up the parchment, suspecting the visitor from the rhythm of the step; indeed it was Ren, Snoke’s prized mercenary, with cigarette as was customary, and with a fresh wound upon his strange face from his forehead across his nose and cheek into the corner of his mouth. His eyes were dark and still as tinajas and his hair was black and wild and in the wake of his fine fabrics always came a scent like lightning having struck metal. Ren’s eyes Hux would meet despite having not dared upon their first meeting. It was still a mild source of embarrassment when he thought on it especially because when it had happened Ren had been only seventeen years old. Since that occasion they had developed between them a sort of awkward and tenuous rapport, on account of Hux had not much patience for Ren’s temper and his mysticism, and Ren had not much patience for Hux’s utter lack of the latter. “What happened to your face,” Hux mouthed. 

Ren ignored him and bowed his head deeply to the high priest. “Father.” 

“We have lost one amongst our flock, sheriff,” said Snoke. “And she wrought untold damage when she left this place.” He leant forward from his jeweled cathedra to touch the scar that swept red and ragged across Ren's narrow face. In the shaft of light streaming gold through the upper windows the priest's cold and ancient skin was thin as paper and slack as a corpse's. Ren's lips tightened infinitesimally; Snoke must have felt it but he did not pull away. "His beauty had already been rather a waste." 

Hux would not have termed Ren’s looks as such. But after over a decade in reluctant service to the Order — Snoke’s mad zealotry and Ren’s wild whims — he had finally given up questioning their strange dynamic.

"He was more fearsome when there was no outward mark he could be bested," Snoke continued, withdrawing from Ren's wound his skeletal hand. "Do you not agree, sheriff." 

"Every contract killer worth his salt has a scar." 

Snoke stiffened at this as though slighted. "He is no bedlamite sword for hire from the settlements or the Southern pass." 

Hux wouldn't've termed Ren as such either for he was clearly mad as were many bearing his gift and he had not come from the Flats, because he sunburned badly. And certainly he was a sword for hire, mind tricks for hire, a blaster crackshot for hire, for Hux was not the only one who came to Snoke's cathedra seeking such favors. He was merely preferred somewhat among the contingent because he could provide Snoke and the Order with more than mere trade goods in return. 

“Your traitoress,” said Hux, “was it she who wrote this pamphlet?” 

“Yes,” Ren said. “And others like it.” 

“Well,” said Hux, “does she mean it literally?” 

Whenever Snoke snapped which was a regular-ish occurrence even Hux who remained ungifted and unblessed felt something like the color draining from the room. Beside him Ren tensed in his black layers and those priests and trainees of the Order milling about their business froze in step and cast their eyes worshipfully groundward. “This is reprehensible blasphemous rhetoric,” Snoke thundered, and Hux heard beside him Ren echo the words in a whisper. “This is the very profane text of the Defector and the traitorous legions. And it will not come to my cathedra gentlemen in our lifetimes by the will of the forefathers.” 

“By the will of the forefathers,” said Ren aloud. 

“To answer your question sheriff she cannot mean it literally because it is sacrilege as you would know if you were devoted.” 

At their every tete-a-tete he attempted at least once Hux’s conversion and even Ren bit his lower lip tightly to keep from smiling. 

“Do you have any notion where she might have gone?” 

“Either she is still in the Flats or she has help here,” said Ren. “The pamphlets multiply.” 

“You will fetch her and any of her associates and bring them to me,” Snoke barked. “If you succeed I will waive Ren’s fee for the dispatching of your weapons trader. And I will throw in with recognition of your great deed for the Order a crate of fine whiskey and perhaps other spoils should you supply her conspirators.” 

“And if I do not find her?” 

“Your failure at this task is quite simply not an option, sheriff.” Snoke coughed again and Hux saw Ren sneak a look up, just a glance from beneath the dark wild veil of his hair, then back down at his boots again. When Snoke’s fit eased the chokes of it echoed in the dark chamber. “Neither,” he said hoarsely, “is it an option for Ren.” 

\--

“We fought,” Ren explained, “when she fled. And she is a fine fighter.” 

Even when unscarred he had concealed his face in public within the dark folds of his hood even in the ragged summer heat such that when they were alone again in Hux’s suite at the sheriff’s office or elsewhere his hair would have stuck to his forehead or the back of his neck with sweat. Now at Hux’s customary back table at one of the Flats’ least reputable cantinas Ren lifted his smooth clay copita to his mouth and in the shadow only the tip of his long nose was visible. 

“She is a fine fighter and she is very desperate and very frightened. Not of me and likely not of any servant of the Order at all. But she is frightened of what she believes.” 

“And now she endeavors to spread that fear.” 

The shadow of Ren’s face cast about the room. “And in part she has succeeded.” 

“You can sense — ”

“Yes; it’s like, it’s stale, like old leather.” He took a cigarette from some concealed pocket in his robes and did not offer a second to Hux. “She of course is mad. It is a common weakness among the gifted.” 

“You don’t say.” 

He ignored that. “Her madness is shared by others,” said Ren. “As the high priest said it is a common blasphemous delusion propagated by the Defector. To suggest such a thing in our territory is to practically throw one’s gauntlet at Snoke’s feet.” 

“A challenge to his sovereignty.” 

“He faces rather few of those,” said Ren. “Thus it quite frightens him.” 

“You speak casually of your master.” 

“If he were not frightened of this inevitability among others he would not have a sworn mercenary.” 

“Inevitability?” 

“Many things have been foretold in scripture and otherwise,” said Ren. “I believe from your secular perspective much of it is irrelevant. What matters is that very likely she is still in the Flats and I know you understand your populace.” 

Hux, in fact, did, rather thoroughly with the exception of Snoke and Ren and their mystic cohort in the templum. But as the commonest feature of the Flats — including the templum folk — was pure desperation he supposed he understood the Order more than he gave himself credit for. “I suggest we start tomorrow morning by canvassing the usual suspects.” 

“Very well,” said Ren. “I have the addresses where each pamphlet was posted. I will have them conveyed this evening to your clerk.” 

“Have you killed anyone yet in service of this mission in particular?” 

Ren lifted his copita again this time to drain it. “No,” he said. “I am prepared to. But to date I have only seen a great deal more of the common folk’s minds than I ever intended. I must admit I am unaccustomed to them working against us.” 

Hux nearly laughed. Said common folk were always working against him except when they had something they stood to gain. Which was hardly ever, from the sheriff’s office. He had long suspected most of them only played along with the Order because of their fear and now that fear had refocused elsewhere. 

Together they left; it was full dark and the gaslights had come up around the settlement advertising bars and brothels and apothecaries and chapels and restaurants and fortune tellers’ and surgeons and the streets were busy. In the square at the Northwest corner they were accosted by a blessed old woman (her face swarming with a set of wormlike wriggling goiters) who screamed through her blackened teeth some of the rhythmic lines from scripture Hux had never understood, but Ren did something and she quieted and limped away. 

\--

He had a strange dream that night about a black door not unlike the portal into the templum. But it was larger even than the one he knew, and it was set deeply into a ridge of soft grey stone. Above the sky was pale and the smell of the air was dawn. About him the very earth was wounded. 

Something was swarming in his head like a cloud of bats or insects and inside it he reached for the door but saw it was sealed with thick metallics, straps and bolts, luster fading, reflective but smudged such that he himself was but a dark smear against the stone around him. And still he reached for what he could grasp and he pulled. 

The metal was so hot and sharp and crumbling with its age he felt the jagged ridges of it cut his hands open. Stigmata — ritual blood what for the summoning and the auguries shining upon its very brightness — 

Then he woke. 

\--

Ren arrived an hour past dawn to the stilts that held Hux’s rooms up against the templum wall and announced his presence by way of ringing the rusty bell. When Hux unlocked the window to assure it was Ren at the door he looked shrouded in his blacks like some ghostly visitor or Hux’s escort to death but when he raised his head to look up Hux saw again the sharp point of the long nose in the dark shadow. 

For years now Hux had locked his doors and windows securely with three different keys he carried always on his person. He had been given a multiplicity of tiny delicacies as goodwill gestures as well as a quantity of alcohol and various drugs that was not, strictly speaking, permissible under the district laws; he did not fear their theft so much as he feared jealousy. Previous sheriffs of the Flats had lost their positions and their lives in coups, which Hux had become particularly attuned to after having carried one out himself. He undid all the locks to let Ren in and felt despite their acquaintance the strange fearful fingers at the base of his spine. He was unaccustomed to others in his rooms let alone others of Ren’s ilk. 

Whilst he had turned his back to fetch them both mugs of hastily-brewed caf Ren had removed his hood and set to peruse the tiny jars and jewel boxes that held Hux’s gifted drugs with a tightly furrowed brow. “Pick your poison,” Hux told him. 

Ren made a noise Hux realized belatedly was a laugh. “I have only ever taken — this and these.” 

He indicated potent psychedelics Hux himself had not dared sample. “Take them if you like. Not my speed.” 

“I wouldn’t in a gathering such as this. You would need to be transcribing my every rambling lest you risk Snoke’s fury.” 

“I did not know he consulted you as an oracle.” 

Ren shrugged. “Not sober.” 

He reached for the tin of fuzzy purple clusters harvested somewhere Northwards and traded to Hux in exchange for a blind eye or two, and set about gutting one of his cigarettes in order to roll them a joint. 

“A bit early, no?” 

“I find it helps me notice things I do not customarily,” Ren explained. “It may help you similarly. If we are indeed to be ransacking a wall’s worth of tarp settlements today. But you don't have to partake if you don’t desire.” 

Hux did not mention they were his drugs to begin with. And he did take a hit or two when Ren passed the joint to him. 

\--

“I should give you something,” said Ren finally. He sat deeply in Hux’s leather desk chair and with the drug his voice was slow and his limbs lax and Hux thought he could see beneath the fine fabric in its heavy black folds and layers somewhat of the strength and the strange artfulness of the body. 

“What is it?” 

“What she looks like,” said Ren, as though it were obvious. “The girl. Shut your eyes for a minute.” 

As soon as he did the vision was there vivid and screaming through his whole body such that he forgot for a precious moment that it was not real. She stood over him and she was very young and she held her weapon in one slender hand a swarming humming seam of light so close he could feel it hot and burning against his skin. And she was very beautiful, and Hux had seen her before, at Snoke’s right hand, holding gently in her arms the sweet tender glow of her master’s oracular, as he himself asked for Snoke to lend him Ren for some murderous task or another. And as she had been there so was she now saintly and haunted and cursed by her gift. Her hair was wild and struck in sweat across her face and in her eye was the golden ring of madness Hux had seen on occasion in Ren’s (when he killed) and taken for a zealotrous fanaticism. He — in the memory — was Ren’s long body and he could feel it — tensile strength, and the weight of the fabrics and the expanding swimming in the mind, and the burning sickly yellow ribbon of pain winding through and through the blood — and then Ren tugged his own memory back to himself like a hangman’s noose, violent and defensive; it snapped away like a sheet of paper tearing. To be dropped back into his own rooms so suddenly felt not dissimilar to being shot. In the interim a cloud had passed through the sun and for some reason in the newfound shadow the wound across Ren’s face threw deep canyon shade off from itself into his eyes. 

“We called her Rey if it helps you,” Ren said. 

“It might,” Hux told him; his voice split, humiliatingly. 

“She came to us from who knew where. And she is quite powerful as you have seen now. But she does not quite know entirely just how much.” He stood — his head nearly touched the ceiling — and robed himself again in his hood and cossack. “We could comb this wall entire by nightfall if we start now.” 

\--

Most of the lean-tos on the East wall concealed dank basement rooms excavated by night and connecting a series of family homes and businesses by tunnel. The less savory aspects of Hux's job mandated he spend more time in the subterranean hideaways than he had ever desired but often he had to admit it led to his reaping of very many rich spoils. Though more often it was just the sewage smell profuse and ripe, impromptu catacombs, endless rot, guttering candleflames — profound eeriness and a stench occasionally so intense he more than once had been moved to vomit. It was here that every Flats insurrection in recorded history had been planned and indeed it was also here that most of them had ended. Hux as a child of his father (there had been East wall Huxes since time immemorial had spurred their relocation, allegedly, from the settlements) had been raised in them, so to speak, but they still put a chill up his spine. Either Ren was of a different breed or he hid his disgust well in his black layers. Hux did not doubt he lived underground with the rest of the trainees in what was no doubt a dark and brutalist ascetic bunkhouse of silence and moral rectitude. 

Despite his disgust the East catacombs, as most locals termed them, were the first place Hux went when he sought someone — whether it was for arresting or an underhanded agreement. Out-of-towners stayed there when they visited and carved into the salt were storerooms guarded by sleepy youths containing drugs and obscure liquors and foreign revolutionaries and bounty hunters and bounty hunted and (supposedly) sacred memorabilia and stolen weapons alike. The weapons trader Hux wanted Ren to kill was certainly down here somewhere but apparently his death could wait. Instead they sought the girl from Ren’s bloody memory. And as such they entered the catacombs near where the first pamphlet had been posted, at the corner of the Southeast square outside a saloon Hux had long considered suspect but frequented anyway for the quality of their moonshine. He had tried to explain to Ren before they departed his rooms — and not for the first time — “If you leave the cloak they might not spill their drinks on you.” But the advice of course had gone unlisted to and now they navigated the darkened bar to the rear staircase through a gauntlet of bloody and bleary glares. 

They descended the creaky staircase then the ladder, Hux first. With the drug indeed everything bore increased definition including the ever-worsening smell. “I’m assuming you understand why they resent the Order,” said Ren, who had summoned somehow a floating sphere of pale light to guide their way, from above Hux in the thick darkness. 

“Why does anybody resent the church or the sheriff or any of it,” said Hux. “Because you expect them to fear you when you do nothing for them. That’s it.” 

“We do a lot for a lot of people,” said Ren petulantly. 

Hux held in his bark of laughter. “Right.” 

It was busy in the catacombs as was customary. Folks bustled from room to room with goods to purchase or trade and they all ignored Hux despite his haphazard uniform and most of them even ignored Ren. A few people approached them to show them goods inside their coats (pockets seen into the lining stuffed with sacred stones or drugs or tiny glass vials of saintly material and/or liquor) or their scuffed leather suitcases. Hux lost sight of Ren for a second until he reappeared stuffing a satchel of something into his robes. 

“What’s that?” 

“Sacred mushrooms.” 

“You could’ve taken some of mine.” 

He could tell despite Ren’s hood that he’d been fixed with one of those looks that suggested whatever he was about to say should’ve been very obvious. “Yours are — not of the premium class.” 

Hux rolled his eyes and walked on. Ren pursued him. “Don’t get me wrong,” he continued, purely uninvited, as per usual. “You’ll trip like hell. But it’s not — admissible as prophesy. Not technically. A case can be made for it in the high courts but — ”

He stopped talking when Hux stopped walking. They'd come to the sanctuary of his most reliable informant — one of the seedier opium dens in the Flats. “Let me talk,” he said to Ren. “It would be a boon to me if you would just sit there and look mystical and threatening.” 

“Fuck you,” said Ren, then, “Fine.” And Hux pushed aside the beaded curtain with one hand breathing deep the sickly-sweet smoke mostly because it was better than the catacomb smell. 

Hux had never had a fondness for opium though his father had and even his mother would occasionally soothe the pain of her blessings with laudanum. When he cried as a child — before she knew he hadn’t been born blessed — she would wet a twist of fabric in it for him to suck. As an adult he had never felt the desire for it, which was more than could be said for half the population of the Flats — a great number of whom were customarily represented at Rhonda’s, passed out on cushions stuffed with hay or smoking languorously from bubbling pipes. In his usual back corner was Levin, thin and haggard, debating with Rhonda herself presumably with regard to his credit. He was a sometime lawyer who had been known to take bribes at trial and dressed the part, though raggedly. “Just in time, sheriff!” Levin cried at the sight of him. 

“That depends,” said Hux. 

Levin was watching Ren over Hux’s shoulder as he bent to kiss Rhonda’s proffered hand. Hux supposed he likely kissed Snoke’s with such frequency he couldn’t be fazed. “What’s this?” 

Hux sat down with Levin on one of the tattered cushions. “See, what I come to talk with you about is bigger than just the sheriff’s department, Levin.” 

Ren sat then, crossing his legs in prayerful style, and extended his hand which Levin did not take. He eyed Ren with a curious wariness. Folks often tried to peer under the big black hood as if to judge Ren’s species or at the very least the state of his blessedness. Indeed many initiates of the Order hid their faces because they were so deformed it couldn’t be accurately ascertained if they were human or not. And in his strung-out uncertainty Levin addressed Ren as such: “It’s from the templum?” 

Ren was used to it. “It is,” he said. 

“We seek a girl who might’ve written some things,” Hux intervened. “Anything you want to tell me — if I like it I’ll pay your tab tonight. All you can drink; I know how you like your poppy tea.” 

Levin sighed. “Should’ve known it would be about that girl.” 

Beside him Hux felt Ren tense in the shoulder but he did not speak. “So you have seen her,” said Hux. 

“I do not doubt everyone down here has seen her.”

“Is she still here?” 

“That I don’t know. And you know I would tell you if I did sheriff.” 

“What dealings did you have with her?” Ren asked. His strange cold voice was sharp around its edges. 

“Same as anyone. She handed out her little letters.” 

“She _handed them out_?” 

Shut up Ren, shut up, shut up, Hux thought furiously. Still Levin reached in his pocket and passed to Hux a tightly folded sheet of pale ivory vellum. 

DEATH IS BURIED HERE

THIS DEATH IS CATCHING

WE HAVE BEEN USED AND DELUDED IN SERVICE OF DOGMA

TRUST YOUR BLESSINGS

RELOCATE TO SURVIVE

“She gave these to everyone?” 

“Not everyone but most everyone. And she and some others hung things up but I bet you saw.” 

“We did see,” said Ren tightly. At Hux’s side he was practically vibrating. 

“Do you know why she says these things? And why people believe her?” 

“It knows better than me,” said Levin. “The Order seeks a messiah. Folk say perhaps she could be one.” 

“She is not one,” said Ren abruptly, and he stood to his full height, a specter in his black robes. Around him the den silenced even of its pipes bubbling and at the door Rhonda was whispering to the burly guard. “She is not one and to suggest as such — ”

Hux stood too and grabbed Ren at the bicep like he would to a drunk for the precinct’s tank squeezing tightly enough to hurt at the muscle and beneath it the bone. “And you do not know if she is here now Levin?” 

In the black cloud shadow of the two of them he cowered. “I — if she is it would be under Silkstockings.” 

“Very well,” said Hux. And still grasping Ren at the arm he marched them to the door and slipped a chit to Rhonda and they left again into the stench through the bead curtain. 

“I told you to fucking be silent,” said Hux as Ren wrenched his arm away. 

“He blasphemed,” said Ren, as though it gave him license to commit whatever atrocity he so desired. 

“That’s what people do,” Hux reminded him. “You would get it if you spent more time in the company of us common folk.” 

“You got the information you desired did you not.” 

Hux sighed and stalked off, not caring if Ren followed, in the direction of the tunnels’ notorious red-light district. Silkstockings, the brothel Levin had mentioned, was staffed primarily by women who would as soon knife you as seduce you; Hux had long suspected most of them were contract killers or at least could be bribed to cut johns’ throats and indeed he had once exchanged a week’s worth of credit at Rhonda’s to one of the Silkstockings whores to take care of a hash trader on one of the occasions Snoke wouldn’t give up Ren for a killing job. Hux himself had been known to visit, only on occasion and only when already drunk, and had seen that they employed also a few young men, also dressed in the titular uniform, the sight of whom made Hux’s mouth dry up even when sober. As a result he customarily avoided the place while on the job but now there was no excuse. At the door he paused and waited for Ren, several steps behind him, whose murderous air was palpable even through his hood. Since they had departed Levin’s company his skeletal hands had not unclenched from fists. When Hux knocked at the double door to enter Silkstockings he felt Ren itch to knock it down. It seemed the side effect of his gift was he was utter shit at keeping even his secretest thoughts to himself. 

The door was opened by one such of the boys dolled up in frilly girls’ things, who eyed Hux reproachfully. Beside him Ren diverted the black void of his face. 

“I’d hoped to speak to Maz,” said Hux. 

The boy swung the door wide and leant against it with his arms folded over his narrow chest. The ash-pink blush of his left nipple was visible through the sheer white fabric of his shirt. Hux searched his memory but did not recall this one, which certainly did not mean they had had no intimate acquaintance before. “Come on in and sit, sheriff,” said the kid, indicating the red sitting room, the benches and couches and the vacant bar and the dizzying eternity of mismatched mirrors, then he turned languorously to Ren. “It needs to take its hood off before it joins you.” 

“Like hell it does,” said Ren.

He did something silent between their minds for the kid turned from him and the door and went back into the darkness. Ren came in and shut the door loudly and pulled from nowhere the ball of golden light that he held in his hand. It illuminated for a second a slice of his mouth and jaw which were clenched so tight that the lips were bloodless. He was thinking so loudly but Hux couldn’t tell what. He could feel it, though, like a siren, just higher-pitched than the frequencies he could hear. Ren held himself in what seemed some prayerful form, straight-backed with his knees pressed together tightly, except he was bouncing his heels with an anxious fervor. It was altogether sort of darkly funny for he sat upon a frilly pouf of horsehair, where, Hux knew, men customarily received lapdances. “Calm the fuck down, Ren,” he said, expecting no avail. 

The black void turned to Hux and then away again. “You do not understand what is at stake.” 

“I know some.” 

“No, you don’t.”

He would have pressed Ren on it but Maz emerged from the back rooms. She was small and thin and grey-haired and some people said she was thousands of years old. Hux doubted it but had to agree she looked the part. Likely just to antagonize him she sat beside Ren who promptly set to bouncing his heels more aggressively still. “Sheriff,” she said, with some surprise. She rarely saw him in an official context. 

“Looking for a girl, Maz,” said Hux, knowing she wasn’t one for pleasantries. 

“To ease the burden of your friend’s virginity? I have just the lady — ”

“I’m not a virgin,” said Ren abruptly. 

“We seek an escapee from the templum. A girl called Rey.” 

“Of course,” said Maz. “I should’ve known.” 

“So you have seen her?” 

“Yes. Days ago she was down here. I’ve not seen her since.” 

“An informant placed her here,” said Ren. Sometimes in his moods his voice sounded as blunt and clipped as an old radio announcer’s, cold and exacting, like a razor for cutting symbols in bread. 

“You really ought to stop bothering that old hophead, Hux.” 

“He’s a valuable resource.” 

“He don’t know last night from last year. He’s too addled to be at all reliable.” 

“So she isn’t here?” 

“She’s long gone. I don’t know where. But she left — five, six days ago. We housed her while she needed. She was cut up — her hands.” She looked into the black void at Ren’s face like she could see what lived under there. “Used up. I am sure you know.” 

“Yes,” said Hux, for he could nearly hear Ren’s teeth grinding. “She’s a fine fighter.” 

“She is. She is strong. But she is fearful. And now she is gone.” 

“Who consorted with her,” said Ren coldly, “when she was here, who was with her?” 

“I assure you both none of us know where she’s gone.” 

“We still would speak with her associates if you’d allow it.” 

Max stood. When she did she was of a height with Ren, sitting. “Have I ever been uncooperative with you, sheriff.” 

“Never, Maz.” 

“Right,” she said. “Now you sit. Would you like a drink? I’ll fetch Wynn.” 

“Mezcal for me,” said Hux. 

“And you sir?” 

Ren turned the void to her. Hux had seen him consume any number of proffered intoxicants on previous forays and he remembered in Ren’s coat were the ritual mushrooms, but still he said, “Nothing.” 

Wynn when he arrived with Hux’s mezcal was not one of Maz’s boy whores but rather a bartender, born in the settlements and emigrated to the Flats when a rival gang sought blood vengeance, rather handsome if windblown with pockmarked skin and a blessing at his neck that he had grown a black beard over to no avail. 

Hux could feel Ren’s disgust like heat haze off the desert. It was vaguely disconcerting that after but a dozen years working together on an irregular and begrudging basis he was so attuned to the wild and feral emotions of an overgrown manchild madman. But customarily Ren did not so embarrass him. Hux ignored him pointedly and turned to Wynn. “Maz tells me you had some interaction with a runaway from the templum a few days back.” 

Wynn was watching Ren, who had bristled. “Is that why it’s crawled out from its lair.” 

“Yes,” said Hux, before Ren could do something drastic. “He is in consultation with me on this case. Locating her is a matter of public interest.” 

“Right,” said Wynn. He was trying to peer beneath Ren’s hood. “A nineteen year old wounded and terrorized child. A matter of public safety.” 

“Your doubt does not concern me,” said Hux. “Anyone is capable of anything. As a man working in a house of repute this ill I’d think you’d understand that.” 

“Fine,” Wynn said. “I can’t tell you where she’s gone.” 

“So we’ve heard,” said Ren. 

“She left for her own safety. Her own protection from folk such as yourselves who comprehend not her mission and her calling.” 

At the last phrase Ren was on the edge of his horsehair pouf and he itched for his weapon with such intensity Hux feared Wynn could feel it. “What is her mission and her calling,” he asked, in an attempt at distraction. 

“You do not yet understand?” 

“The unseating — the disruption of our complete civilization,” Ren interrupted. “A slap — spit in the face of those who brought our species from the brink of extinction and united us again under faith and service to the Order and the sacred relics.” 

The room seemed very quiet then because he had spoken so loudly and Hux could feel the eyes of the whores and of Maz peering out from their bead curtains and makeshift handmade blast doors. 

“She would not term it as such,” said Wynn. “And its understanding of history is willfully obtuse as is typical.” 

“Tell us what she would term it,” said Hux carefully. He watched Ren, who was seething like an animal, mindful that he might have to move quickly to avoid civilian casualty paperwork, which was a bitch even when fudged. 

“Revolution,” said Wynn, “upheaval. In the true grand tradition of our ancestors rejecting adherence to cultish teachings as anything other than a cheat and a con and a lie. To sucker the desperate out of resources and out of years of their lives and out of anything resembling fulfillment — ” 

When Ren stood his black hood nearly touched the ceiling and he removed his wrappings and his strange face was bloodless and his mouth tight and his dark eyes murderous and in the darkened hallways beyond the anteroom Hux heard the sound of the whores moving quickly from their doors like the tittering of mice. Few saw Ren’s face and lived to describe it, Hux recalled. Perhaps he was the only one outside the templum who had achieved it. “Ren,” he said, “sit down.” 

He loomed instead imperious as a thundercloud or a plume of black smoke from the burning of oil upon the desert as if he had not heard Hux at all. Which of course perhaps he hadn’t. The scar upon his face was abraded by shadow like a track of meltwater in a dust-pale wash. 

“Where has she gone,” said Ren. In it was a thin tensile strand of his holy compulsion. And Wynn was frightened and Hux could taste it, like a thread of blood in raw meat. The room, impossibly, seemed to have darkened. With them underground something else was stirring cold and ageless like bad water in the back of Hux’s throat. A kind of breeze from nowhere. The veins were standing out in Wynn’s forehead but he would not say where the girl had gone. “Ren,” said Hux, “enough.” 

He stood, and when he did Ren stopped. Wynn gasped for breath somewhere out of frame. He was drooling thinly out of the corner of his mouth and he coughed one single wet sob of fear and otherwise. 

“He really will kill you,” Hux said, crouching, “and I would prefer to spare myself the paperwork.” 

Wynn’s spit to his face he felt kind of secondarily, because he saw first that Ren had put his skeletal hand to Wynn’s throat and lifted him to his feet. A breathless and silent moment passed and then Ren dropped the body and it collapsed to the floor in a heap. Hux was still wiping the spit from his cheek with a sleeve. “God damn it, Ren.” 

Carefully, Ren arranged his hood about his face and hair again. “She’s gone to the Ridge on the Northwest road toward the scablands.” 

“How do you know?” 

“I went in and looked,” said Ren, as though it were obvious. 

“Before you killed him.” 

The black void at Ren’s face was silent for a long moment. “That _was_ what killed him,” he said finally. “Shall we go?” 

Hux left a few credits for Maz for cremation and took with him Wynn’s papers which were old and smooth so often had they been presented to border authorities, and which stated his name and his provenance and the names of his parents and the sigils of every citystate he had visited some of which Hux did not recognize. Then he followed Ren who already was several long strides ahead singlehandedly parting the human tide in the catacombs which signaled the changeover of staffing at the bars and shops and kitchens. 

Outside on the street the light of day was nearly gone. Ren had waited up for him at a corner whose shops hawked relics and mezcal and noodle dishes of assorted origin. In the corner of the sky the full moonlight cast like distant desert caravan lights around the high walls of the templum. “Shall we get drunk,” he said. 

This time, again at their preferred back corner table, Ren accepted the proffered mezcal. The bartender brought the bottle and two copitas and upon some negotiation a plate of tortillas with beans and unidentifiable meatscraps they both picked at, too nervous and frustrated to be hungry. “This’ll be aboveground by midnight, I do hope you know,” Hux said after three copitas-worth of rank bitter liquor swiftly consumed. 

Ren’s black void moved vaguely toward him. He was drunk. “Of course I know.” 

At first he thought perhaps why this event had jarred him so much — he had, after all, seen Ren kill many men before, and several for behavior even less inflammatory — was because he had never seen Ren forfeit so much of his prized and sacred self-control. But then he recalled Ren’s devotion to his master. He had never known a version of Ren, he realized, with a speck of self-control at all — perhaps such a version had never existed. 

A chill pressed down his spine and he tried mostly unsuccessfully to tamp it down, but he did not think Ren noticed. A fixture of the priest — like another limb. Animated from elsewhere, like the legends of ancient wars. 

“You are in for shit, Ren.” 

“Shut up, sheriff.” He slipped one of his hands inside his hood so as to prop up his cheek in his palm and in the golden-orange candlelight from its sconce of antlers on the wall Hux saw a flash of his skin and his birthmarks and his mouth, which was pursed and bloodless and worried. “We’ll go after her.” 

“Through the scablands?” Hux himself had been no further West than the caves. “It’s weeks’ walk to the Ridge and you can be certain she’ll be walking. The vultures will have her before next weekend.” 

“You don’t know her.” 

“Perhaps not but I know humankind.” 

Ren’s laugh was like something hollow smashed with a hammer. “You don’t know that either.” 

“Certainly I’m better acquainted than you.” 

That punch landed. Ren looked away and refiled their copitas. “It’s rather bewildering to me,” he said finally. “Your alleged acquaintance.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean,” said Hux, though he suspected. He also suspected that Ren wouldn’t answer, which he didn’t. He downed the remainder of his drink and stood, again imperious (though this time with his shoulders slumped too low to appear bloodthirsty), and the room silenced for a split second before it returned to a low chatter like grasshoppers devouring a wheatfield. Then he spun with the furling of his robes and stormed toward the door. 

Hux sighed, finished his drink, dropped a few credits on the table, and went out. It was full dark and the mezcal had set his mind spinning just how he preferred and Ren was halfway down the block in a sulk Hux could feel from down the street. He walked quickly to catch up and when he walked again abreast of Ren it was only a few tandem steps before he spoke. "Is that what you —" Ren swallowed. His voice was cold. "Is that what you — prefer. Men in — in girls things." 

The hood and the void at his face was downcast and Hux could not say he was surprised by the line of questioning. He doubted Ren had seen whores before. "Not necessarily," he said.

"So you do prefer them sometimes." 

"I have no preference at all in fact," Hux said, wondering as he shamefully had before what exactly constituted Ren's sexual history. "I take what's offered to me. I don't care what it wears or what's underneath. A fuck is a fuck, see?"

"I see," said Ren slowly. 

"It's as nice with men as women. There are all sorts of — steps that can be taken…”

"I understand."

"Do you really."

"Yes." 

It was quiet on the street and so dark Ren carefully shifted his hood from his face. His brow was knit tightly and his lips pursed and he wouldn't meet Hux's eye. "I have wondered," he said. 

"About sex?"

"About you." 

"I am altogether not different from anyone else in the flats."

"You fucked the blonde that let us in," said Ren. 

"Did I really." 

"He remembered it. Even if you didn't. Do you like blondes?"

"I told you. I have no preference. Why have you been wondering?" 

He turned his face to the soil. "It doesn't become me."

"Few things do,” said Hux. When Ren didn’t answer Hux prompted him. “What is it?” 

"If I wore stockings and lace would you want me?"

Later he would think on this moment and realize he had not been entirely surprised. Ren wouldn't meet his eyes and he held himself braced as though for a fight. "No. Ren. Like I said it's — like icing on a cake. I don't need it." He swallowed his pride and whatever else. "Is there something you want to tell me?" 

"You can't infer?"

"I prefer not to assume on matters such as this." 

“I’ve had visions,” said Ren. 

“Of — us?” 

“Yes. Various and sundry for some years now.” 

“Do they always come true, your visions?” 

“Usually.” 

“Don’t be humble.” 

“Fine,” said Ren, and as he got increasingly nervous his voice got louder and his face reddened across the bridge of the nose, “almost always but this one I have never paid particular credence to for reasons that may be obvious.” 

“Not obvious to me as I can neither read minds nor see the fucking future.” 

“Book four section four line twenty-eight,” Ren shouted, “those who do not believe shall be sickened and be with trembling until their death rush up in but two days.” 

“I remain unimpressed by your zealous bullshit and knack for occult memorization. And by your sacred upholding of your fucking twisted sex dreams.” Ren’s lips tightened but he said nothing. “I would have been perhaps amenable if you didn’t make it out to have some perverted ritual context.” 

Suddenly the night smelled vividly of rain. Ren was watching Hux with an expression that straddled lustful and fearful and God help him if it didn't turn him on. The stillness in the bright eyes was liquid — and the supple wine-red mouth — 

"Are you serious?" Ren asked. 

"I don't make a habit of lying." He had thought about it once or twice, customarily while drunk with one of Maz’s. That perhaps of all the sexual conquests one could achieve in the end the most impressive (above and beyond frequently surviving a brothel staffed by known killers of men) would be going to bed with the Order’s feral lich mercenary. Who, from the looks of him, was either a desperately humiliated virgin or a self-regulated and purely insatiable slut. Hux felt like his veins were wicks of fuse running toward something primed to burst. Beside him Ren swallowed audibly. “Come have a drink.” 

\--

They went back to Hux’s rooms and climbed the ladder with some difficulty and once inside — in the pitchy dark but for the moon through the slats and the tarp and the window strung with a scrap of found lace — Ren shoved Hux against the door such that the stilts trembled. 

“You could fuck me — through this wall if you wanted,” said Ren. His face was very close and in his dark eyes sucking black in the night some unfamiliar current was shifting like a worm. He had drug his lower lip plump and red through his teeth as punctuation and it sent something like lightning through Hux’s gut. “You could fuck — God, your house down, and I would take it.” 

At first he was rather shocked that was the arrangement in which Ren was interested but thought not to look a gift horse in the mouth. For the most powerful person Hux had ever met it did not come as a surprise that it seemed he got off on being rendered otherwise. They went to the bed — a canvas bag raised on cinderblocks and plywood, softened with itchy straw and synthetic wool, maintained pristine and with hospital corners by Hux each morning — and Ren proceeded to beg to be debauched with such colorful prosthelytizing Hux finally had to command him to shut up. Stripped him, quickly and functionally, stood to admire the long slender body in his bed. The inkspill of his hair upon the flat square pillow and the blood spatter of his birthmarks against his face, his neck, his chest, God, his belly, inside his thighs… he shifted as though the sheets tormented him (perhaps they did; the mattress was itchy), pressing up toward Hux from the small of his back, lifted like a marionette — 

“Be still,” said Hux; against all odds Ren listened. Circumstances fragile as trinitite glass. He spread his palm out on Ren’s pale belly such that his thumb and his pinky finger connected two of the birthmarks and Ren made a soft sound through his nose. He felt there the lowest shelf of ribs. All the soft pieces within slowly failing with the poison of his gift. 

Two drunks fought in the street before one was silenced by gunshot. And the wind howled through the walls and the windows and about the templum. Ren had birthmarks on his back and shoulders and a tattoo amongst the raised ridges at the center of his spine done messily by some other hand, a crooked circle carven with six even rays around the central sun: the glyph for faith, the symbol of the Order — and he had other scars from weapons unrecognizable and/or surgeries incomprehensible, and some of the marks were raised and red and new and others were cold and ancient white knots. Hux opened him up like a book, made him come (a small ragged cry, like a lost bird), pushed inside him (all too easy) while he was still shaking. Sometime toward the unraveling of it he felt Ren — God, it was strange, because one of Ren’s hands was in his hair, and the other on account of his limbs being so freakishly long was on his ass, clammy warm, fingertips so near the cleft of him all the imagining was screwing itself up in Hux’s head, but it felt as though Ren had taken two very tight fistfuls of all the dark matter of his soul, like everything he wore even when he was naked, and started pulling as hard as he could… 

_Come here_ , said Ren’s voice, not aloud. _Come here, come here, come here come here please._

It was the least he could do, Hux thought. When he came he heard a distinct roiling of thunder far away and spared in the most stalwart vestiges of his conscious mind a short prayer for rain… but later when he lay beside Ren in the dry darkness he realized it was likely the sound had only been some unselfed function of the wild mind beside him. 

\--

This time in the dream he rested and pressed his ear to the door. Inside his heart it was singing and the thing in his mind was saying, press on, press on child, open up, open up — 

Your forefathers took the things they wanted and now you too will take the things you want, child. 

Bless you, bless you, by the blessings and gifts and the auguries amen. 

The metal was hot but it felt like a warm bath now and he pressed his forehead to the door and prayed. And impossibly next when he pulled he heard amidst the singing the grating the grating of the metal upon the stone — 

He woke still in the coming dawn with his hands spread across Ren’s back. In the soft paling darkness Ren’s head — his wild hair and his ghost of breath — rested upon Hux’s chest and one of the long-fingered skeletal hands tucked beneath his ribs. 

Somewhere inside him Ren’s breath was squeaking just a pinch like a bad stair. Outside the breeze round the templum in the night. And Hux found even with his blooming hangover headache he could not sleep again for it was too close to dawn. 

\--

The evening they met, he sometimes recalled, he had come in from his rounds in the early dusk to find the precinct silent and its denizens gathered nervously (hands to blasters) around a figure draped so in heavy black fabric he couldn’t tell at first sight its gender or even its species. Then it exhaled a thick white cloud of cigarette smoke. Hux himself had been deputized not a month and was already in a few pockets and already plotting his overthrow of the sheriff. They had been lazily investigating a series of murders, lazily because the victims were trainees of the Order, with whom they did not customarily liaise. Until just then. 

A very white hand (like the instrument of some lich thing), the only visible skin, was offered to Hux and he took it and they clasped palms rather than shook. In the soft gold dregs of light through the window its weapon glinted in its belt — Hux had never seen one before in his life. And he had doubted they were real, because his mother insisted in fact they were. 

“It comes from the templum,” said the sheriff, refreshing his bourbon. “To help us with the killer of — its folk.” 

It turned out Hux, because he lacked seniority, had been volunteered. 

“The high priest sent me,” said the thing whilst Hux showed it the sketches of the victims. The sickly ash curl of its cigarette smeared across the fine vellum paper. The voice was younger than Hux had expected but hoarse and soft with smoke. “There are only so many of us. It is — dangerous to waste.” 

“Right.”

The bodies had been disassembled more like by an animal than a surgeon. Sometimes the guts were missing, or the brains. Later he would think about them in great detail but at the time they were just bodies. And growing up where he had sometimes there were bodies in the streets, or you would go return some tool to your neighbor and find at last they had succumbed to their blessings. Hux remembered he had said to the creature, “None of them have been — interfered with.” 

“He would not — we disgust him, do you see.” There was a note of laughter or of strange pride in the voice and Hux would have denied it frightened him. “He is someone sick with a bad blessing. Seeking vengeance for his own failures.” 

“How are you certain?” 

It was a stupid question to which the creature did not respond. With the strange hands it folded the sketches again and passed them to Hux. “I will expect you outside the black door tomorrow an hour after dawn.”

Hux had been only once before in the moment of his attempted baptism to the black door and just standing in its vicinity he felt a kind of residual embarrassment but still he arrived early with a thermos of caf, black and spiked with his least good whiskey as a halfassed attempt at peace offering. When the thing came out like manifesting from shadow they shared it in the soft morning breeze. It turned out folk were more likely to talk to a sheriff’s deputy when he was accompanied by a hooded sacred creature from the templum. Those who had the sign of the Order marked outside their dwelling inclined their heads and greeted the thing by its presumed name — “Ren.” Sometimes they would murmur lines of scripture that Ren would echo and more than once Hux stood in silence while they prayed together, in the smoky darkness beneath the blue tent of some or another blessed; they would ask about the bodies and the sounds at night and they would leave again. They fought many times — once explosively — there were many questions Ren would not answer and many to which he laughed in Hux’s face. And still Hux began to consider that perhaps in the great coup d’etat he fomented inside his head when he lay awake at night in his chambers, perhaps despite his misgivings this tenuous allyship was in the end necessary. And then he lay awake still, and wondered what the creature’s face was like beneath the hoods. 

He had everything planned to a T but then it was thrown off two years by an upheaval he later thought perhaps he should have foreseen. Two more died before they found a hovel on the South wall, reported for its smell — a kind of trophy case of parts preserved in black-market chemicals, and the fragile and strange ritual things of the Order assembled for the reading of auguries, and locks of soft bloody hair woven with herbs and fabric — and that night in the moonlit darkness they chased the shadow who had run upon the sight of them through the tangled streets of the settlement toward the berms and the desert beyond. Hux took a wrong turn and then wandered in the darkened slum overwhelmed by his wild heartbeat until he felt something tugging like a noose at his mind — like something very important he had forgotten to do, except it was living. 

Ren had never before dared. No one had dared since his mother’s favorite priest. And he had not altogether believed it could be done. 

When he came to where it called him in the thick shadow darkness standing in the light-cast clearing was some very tall man-thing black and red as the space between stars who turned at the sound of Hux’s boots upon the salt. The face illuminated by the humming red light of his weapon was very young and fine and narrow with a dark spot beneath one eye and more across the cheek. And the hair was static and wild, and the red glow of the weapon was in the eyes like a possessor, and it wore Ren’s clothes. And it held the seam of light to the raised white underthroat of a man who knelt at its feet, and that man, with his mouth frothing blood, was Hux’s father. 

“Stop thinking about it,” said Ren’s wet mouth against his chest, in the present. His callused thumb passed over Hux’s nipple. 

\--

After dawn Hux lay still and feigned sleep as Ren rose naked to fetch himself a drink of water from the bucket Hux had drawn up the day before. In the soft patterning light through the lace and the slats and the white sky beyond all his bones were not so much artful as they were very much bones. There was a bite mark inside his thigh and another vivider still at the sharp knob crowning his freckled shoulder and his dark hair was mussed and curled a little at his jaw and his scars were patchwork and multifold like long ago many strange things had been sewn up inside him. He drank from the ladle direct and a few drops fell to his chest in the pale light and as he palmed the water away Hux thought, God, he must know I’m awake. 

They dressed and had breakfast — cold oatmeal — in relative silence and over a joint Ren leaned across the table blushingly to kiss Hux’s lips warm and chaste-ish with his mouth tasting like cigarette and sugar. 

“I would have thought you all had some chastity agreement.” 

Ren shrugged. He had dressed himself only in his black pants and loose undershirt and Hux thought he probably knew how good he looked because the morning breeze was chilly and his skin was goosebumped inside the wrists. As he stood and collected Hux’s chipped ceramic bowls to rinse them clean with water he said, “Some do.” 

“But you do not.” 

Crouching by the window the morning light played across his face such to almost pale the scar out and he looked youngish but also very old in the eyes. “It was not — the decision was not so much made for me.” He stood and stacked the bowls in the windowsill and smiled tightly over Hux’s shoulder. “If you have more probing questions you should speak now or hold your peace until next you drunkenly fuck me magnanimous.” 

He kicked his chair out and when it nearly fell over he caught it with his mind and set it down four feet on the floor and sat across from Hux with his elbows on his knees as though this were some back-room interrogation. Not for the first time Hux considered Ren’s infuriating way of doing and saying everything he did and said so as to not so much answer any questions posed his way but to simply inspire more. The compendium of them swarming and multiplying in Hux’s mind day by day. He thought about saying, what makes you so sure there will be a next? But then he thought Ren had perhaps foreseen it in some psychedelic vision. “I wonder,” Hux said finally, “in your thinking — the girl. Why is this her particular madness?” 

He could tell even ungifted when Ren somewhat deflated; perhaps he had been expecting something salacious and personal. “Because she’s mad.” 

“Most madness is — ” He thought, rather sentimentally, of his mother’s. And then, less so, of his father’s. “Rooted in some very real fear. Especially if it is indeed shared as you say. By the Defector and his traitorous legions, et cetera.” 

Ren sighed and from the silver case of his cigarettes resting upon the table he took one of the last remaining three. “It’s a very long story.” 

“So there is one.” 

“Yes.” The match caught gold in his eyes. “There is something,” he said, then he paused, as though he were treading somewhere lightly. “This and every templum is… but a monument left by the forefathers. And when the Order first came to settle in this place there was no grand structure. There was only the black stone floor and the black door beyond which is a great subterranean complex.” 

“What is it?” 

“I have only seen… in visions. It is a kind of storehouse of many dark rooms cut in the salt full like to their ceilings with reliquaries.” 

“And what’s in the reliquaries?” 

“I know not. I do know — ” He put the cigarette between his lips and laid his long spidery hands palm up in Hux’s. They were smooth and flat and very pale, unmarked of any line or feature and there seemed some fuse or seam about the palm as though the skin there had been reattached. “There is one that calls to me — not here. And long ago I touched it. Just to pray. It kept my skin.” 

When Hux went to touch Ren pulled his hands away. “I do believe that Snoke knows more than he lets on,” said Ren, taking the cigarette from his mouth. “He keeps the secrets rather close to his chest.” 

“Where does he get the secrets from?” 

“Forefathers,” said Ren. “Where does anybody get their secrets from?” 

Hux, who feared chiefly what he had inherited from his father, stared longingly at Ren’s cigarette. 

“There is — shall we say a schism in the Order as you may have inferred,” Ren continued. “From long ago. Like all schisms in all establishments governed by the word of law it comes down to a disagreement in the reading of the holy scripture. And so when Snoke speaks of the Defector it is the party responsible for that schism to whom he refers. It is the methodology they practice — elsewhere in the desert. They abandoned the Order when the forefathers elected to open and settle the templa as chiefly they do not believe the sites are to be disturbed or to be accessed.” 

He thought he recalled from his mother’s tall tales and Snoke’s ramblings. “Is that not blasphemy.” 

“As though you care,” said Ren. “We would say it is. They do not believe it to be. In fact they believe our interpretation to be blasphemy. And as no one living can read the language of the scripture anymore we are at an impasse as to resolution. As we have been now for several hundred years.” 

“But they — the Defector, do they have the same — your gift?” 

“It is rarer as are the blessings but some indeed are touched. Where I was born you could not see the monument but from the highest rise on the clearest day. And I was born gifted as was my mother.” 

“So your parents —”

“I do not speak of this,” said Ren. He took another of his cigarettes from the silver case. “Ask me something else.” 

“You said it called to you.” 

“It has since I was young. It sings like, in my blood. I do not speak of this either.” He struck another match bright and sulfurous against Hux’s table. “Cigarette?” 

Hux accepted though Ren’s smokes were odd, tasting of herbs and metals, shipped via black market from who knew where and thus almost unbearably stale. But they burned quickly and they were thick with narcotic. “So the girl.” 

“It appears she is a sympathizer to the more radical factions. And it also appears she considers herself — and perhaps others consider her as such too. But it has been foretold now for generations there will be born a child who can read again the language of the scripture and it seems she claims herself to be that child.” 

“So she can — ”

“Yes. If she accrues a following she can end said impasse for good. And inasmuch as we have awaited her for centuries it appears she has chosen to end it for good in favor of the wrong side.” 

“Chosen?” 

Ren took a drag from the cigarette. And when he spoke again he watched at the early sun in the window and the moving shadow of the templum rather than into Hux’s eyes. And thus it seemed, even when he spoke and his voice was soft and steady, that he himself was uncertain of what he believed. “How can she prove she can truly read it? If no one else can?” 

“So now you have doubt.” 

“It comes down the nature of power,” said Ren, into the spreading shadow upon the desert. “Do you serve it or does it serve you?” Hux did not point out Ren had been on his knees groveling to power for years untold for it seemed from the way he bowed his head that he already knew it.

\--

Hux himself had only heard of travel to the Ridge as part of a caravan or at the very least accompanied by a professional guide of which there were few in the Flats. The desert West of the caves — approaching the scablands and beyond them the settlements — could be dangerous and was reportedly roved by assorted gangs and cults of children and traffickers and mutilated veterans of the Eastern wars and traders of drugs and weapons and priceless minerals and allegedly sacred relics. Immigrant parties traveling that way had been known to go missing in the desert and show up weeks later in states of bloody wreckage with only one or two survivors to tell the tale but for they had been driven mad. Hux himself had attempted to speak to a few in questioning and had chalked them up as victims of Eldritch horror and consigned them to the madhouse on the West wall. Travel with a large caravan was relatively secure if the right hired guns had been procured and were not themselves corrupt, and a good guide could help a small party fly under the radar, but Hux found he could not summon any desire to attempt the trip at all, especially given certainly the girl was traveling alone and thus would soon be dead. But perhaps nothing now was certain; after all, he had slept with Ren. 

They left Hux’s place in the early afternoon and at first he thought Ren had a guide in mind to visit and negotiate with but in fact he had only elected upon a visit to the library. Intriguingly, he chose the secular one on the West wall, which was not far, in fact, from the madhouse. Priests of the Order were extremely vocal about their sacred library in the templum into which only select among the faithful were allowed for it contained well-preserved books that were apparently thousands upon thousands of years old. But in the end given this was the scripture the girl had apparently found a miraculous way to translate even their holy screening of visitors seemed rather useless. 

The keeper of the place showed them to the map room and shut the door on her way out and Ren removed his hood. His lips were very red and his hair disheveled and though certainly he didn’t look much different customarily Hux found himself filled with a useless and mostly sexual frustration. 

“What are you looking for?” 

“The best route,” Ren said, “obviously.” 

“We are _not_ walking alone unguided to the Ridge.” 

Ren opened a few drawers and laid a few fine vellum cylinders tightly wrapped and fragile as glass upon the reading table. Carefully he lit the gaslamp and then he opened each of the maps and instructed Hux to hold one corner to keep them from rolling back up again. They had each been drawn by hand and very long ago and they marked ancient burial sites and abandoned settlements and fallow farmland and each and every scab in the scablands illustrated in gory detail. Sketched upon them even were estimates of the ancient borders and a bit of military history and sites where minerals could be mined and fields in which relics had been unearthed. “Who made these?” Hux asked. 

“Another Ren. A few generations before me.” 

“I didn’t know it was such a common name among — ”

“It’s not my name,” Ren interrupted. “It’s my title. It’s like how you’re sheriff.” 

For a moment he was surprised and even vaguely and embarrassingly hurt that he hadn’t known this. Then the imagining swiftly devolved into a vivid and imaginative hallucination of Ren — breathless, yearning, resplendent naked — calling him sheriff in bed. 

“I thought it was your name.” 

Ren took from another drawer a magnifying glass he lowered so close to the smooth sheer vellum his nose nearly touched it. “It’s not.” 

“Well would you like if I called you something different?” 

Hux was watching the magnifying glass and Ren’s long nose move slowly Northwesterly toward his gentle hold on the paper. And he was watching, intermittently, the light moving across the floor. Finally Ren said, “My given name is not dissimilar.” 

“What is it?” 

“Inconsequential.” 

_Oh my God_ , Hux almost said aloud. 

“You can call me Ren.” He was looking up. In the buttery gaslit darkness their faces were very close. 

“You sound like a child,” Hux said. The guilt arrived immediately after; perhaps Ren rather was one. Indeed the long strange face had twisted, and pulled away. “I’m not walking to the Ridge.” 

“I’ve walked to the big river before and I’m in one piece.” 

“That much is debatable.” 

Ren scowled again. “Fine. Be a fool, and a coward. Next map.” 

“Next map _please_.” 

Hux watched, with glee, Ren’s lower lip pinch for just a second between his overlarge front teeth. “Next map,” he said, “please.” When Hux revealed it he saw it was a lovely detail piece concerning the big river and its spreading bloody canyon district to the northwest complete with detailed topography. Beneath his big heavy cossack Ren’s long spine bent again toward it. “If we keep from the ancient royal road — generally it is quieter on the ranches or at least it has been since the last war.” 

“When even was the last war?” 

“Big one? Maybe two — two and a half generations.” 

“How do you know anything about it at all.” 

“Memories have been shared with me. If you like I could share them with you.” 

“I’d prefer not.” 

“Fine,” said Ren. “I’m not surprised by your willful ignorance.” 

“Nor I by yours,” Hux said. “Why did you walk to the river district?” 

“Whyever do I do anything.” 

“Well then. Did you go to bed with me also because Snoke demanded?” 

Ren carefully coiled the river district map himself and opened the final one gently as though he were unwrapping a fine gift. “That’s not what I meant,” he said. 

“Then what did you mean.”

“I told you. I’d seen it.” 

“In what — Ren. Do all your visions lack even the slightest context?” 

“No,” he said. “There are these jigsaw pieces that stick with each other. So I saw her. But she had no face. And then us — and everything burning.” He swallowed and Hux watched his throat move. His hands were still upon the map like large dead moths desiccating in the insistent desert sun. “Over and over. That’s all.” 

“Well, two out of three ain’t bad.” 

“It’s an outcome,” said Ren. “A potential.” 

“It’s a psychedelic mushroom trip.” 

“You _just said_ two out of three wasn’t bad.” 

“And I have no credence for any of the Order’s apocalypse theories on account of I’ve never known one to come true.” 

“Most of the lower priests’ theories come from — false augury,” said Ren. He lowered the magnifying glass to the final map. “Here,” he said after a moment. His long finger traced a minuscule line of smudge Hux could barely make out, through the canyon district on an ancient causeway. “Our road. Through a very sacred landscape.” 

“It’ll take us weeks to reach it.” 

“We’ll beg a speeder from Snoke,” Ren said. “I’ll rehearse my contrition.” 

“Indeed you will.” 

He watched Ren roll the final map. He had thought perhaps after this he would go alone to see about a guide but suddenly that seemed like an altogether useless plan of action. Snoke would never concede to their hiring a guide and Hux doubted he could afford a guided three-week walk on his own, anyway. Probably the best prospect currently was to make careful and informed analysis of Ren’s alleged ability to perform contrition. He wondered if Ren had ever truly been sorry about anything. 

They went back to Hux’s rooms. There were two hours yet even til dusk and Hux had done positively no work and did not care. Inside Hux poured them each copitas of a rare and bitter whiskey and as they drank rolled a joint he smoked while Ren undressed carefully unwrapping himself ragged oversize piece by ragged oversize piece until he had unbraided his complete strange pale body from the black wrappings like a reverse metamorphosis, shedding chrysalis, choosing his own less evolved form. 

His goldenhour skin, Hux thought. He handed the joint over and Ren took it and as he exhaled he knelt between Hux’s knees. Then he passed it back up again. 

\--

For an hour or so after the fact he dozed and he would have drifted into sound sleep but for Ren thinking so loudly — impressions, like a wild wind, or like a loose thread — so close beside him in the bed. He had thrown off the covers in his sleeplessness in the heat and he lay on his back as though in state, with his long arms crossed loosely about the chest such that he grasped the opposite shoulder. Hux noted the openness and redness of the mouth to his own chagrin. And then his eyes were drawn inexorably elsewhere. 

“Your cock is big.” 

Ren’s eyes opened just somewhat off sync like a desert lizard. “What?” 

“I said your cock is big.” 

He looked down at it then back at Hux. “Is it okay?” 

“Yes. Has no one ever told you that before?” 

“No.” 

“No? It must be — it’s bigger than mine.” 

Ren swallowed and Hux watched the cords of his neck. “I like yours.” 

“I mean, thank you, but — ” It was difficult, he realized, waking as such from sleep, to sound anything other than a little petulant. “You could fuck me, if you want. Perhaps next time if there is one.” 

Ren just stared at him from across the pillow in the dark and sleepily his pale brow furrowed. “I can’t do that. To you.” 

“Why not?” He shifted in the bed. He could feel the moon bitter acid over his shoulder. “Other people have.” 

At that he could have sworn Ren’s jaw tightened just a bit. He felt oddly victorious when Ren turned away from him and curled against the wall. Perhaps only to remind Hux that his bony ass was also moderately endearing. But his long strange hand cupped his shoulder just too tightly and his fingernails were bitten ragged. 

“Ren.” 

“I was meditating,” he said, and it dulled like old metal against the wall. 

Hux tried and failed to quash the heavenward rolling eyes his mother would often employ when she pled for strength. “Right.” 

Ren did not speak again but he twitched until he fell asleep. Which was not longer than twenty minutes in which Hux watched the stars move in the window and listened with a kind of savage glee to Ren holding his whole mind in a fist until it unraveled, rather like an orgasm, spilling dreams. 

\--

The scream loosed from his throat was acid. And in it the grating — the horrible peeling of the stone and the door. Tremors tearing the earth apart and himself apart. He was shaking to pieces inside his mind. The power came through himself like it never had in his life before — as though it were his blood or his breath and it was singing — 

When the portal opened he stumbled through it and fell to his knees sobbing in its cold stale metal breath and the pain such he thought he would never move again. He prayed over and over the most comforting lines from scripture with his broken fingernails scrabbling in the dust pressing into the wounds upon his hands. 

He was telling the earth — the swallowing salt — you can have me now. Please take me. And the breeze came through the open door and cooled the sweat and the tears upon his face and the blood having run from his hands over his arms and blackening upon the front of his shirt and spreading in the dust. And the voice in his head said, up. Up you get, child, up you get. And as such he stood, and he walked, and he felt not entirely animated by himself (his mind and its tenants dragging his body along), and the light he summoned to walk with him pulsed like a heart, or like something breathing, and it sang soft, and it whispered. 

It walked him deep enough into the earth to find relics in their casing and such was their power that the air was searing and it vibrated before his eyes. There were hundreds of them in this low-ceilinged room and they were metallic as blood and marked with the bright symbols of the Order. His own heart in his chest was slamming skips and the breath choked out of him and before he could so much as think the voice and the light moved him to press his wounded hands against the shining metallic flank of it. And it was nearly instant that the power (power always and eternal emanation to the body to inherit power is to oneself be power) burned him up immolated like dry grass set him aflame screaming from the inside and finally finally God blessedly finally after all the long years of nightmare he could feel the self pulled like a loose thread inexorably from his body — 

“Hux?” 

Ren who was looking pale and nervous in the blue darkness. Who leant over him as best he could in the narrow bed and whose big hand was wrapped so tightly around his shoulder Hux thought he could feel the ridges of the scars — 

He sat so quickly his head met Ren’s, hard, with a sound like a melon dropped from a height. “Fuck,” he said, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Oh, fuck, fuck.” His voice sounded underwater and against his ribs his heart still pounded upon the door. 

“I’m sorry,” Ren said, unlike himself, soft in the dark. Hux could feel his strange warmth close like a dark stone having held the heat of the sun. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You were dreaming.” 

“I wasn’t,” said Hux, aware he sounded hysterical. “We can’t fuck again if you won’t learn to shut off your fucking brain.” 

“What?” 

“Don’t — I can hear your memories.” 

Ren looked for a moment like he feared he would have to extract himself from the bed with his weapon. Which was still on the floor, probably under Hux’s desk, having rolled across the uneven boards, thoroughly abandoned in their fucking. “Which ones?” 

“I think you know very fucking well which — how in hell did you survive that?” 

Unsaid, the horrible shivering crux of it: I could feel you dying. 

For only a moment Ren feigned — open mouth, quizzical brow — he didn’t know what Hux was talking about. Then he gave up, deflated somewhat, shifted his sleep-rumpled hair from his face with one hand such that it showed the strange dramatic point of his widows’ peak. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I did.” He wouldn’t look at Hux when he spoke and his skin was vivid in the cold blue nightshadow and in it his hair and his freckles were ink-black. “He came for me. I woke up in this templum. I think it was months later, he's never told me. His is the voice, if you haven’t surmised.” 

“Do you think he — ”

“He claims.” Ren sighed. And he wrestled with the dark words — “He claims he can perform necromancy.” 

The vision passed unbidden through Hux’s mind and he wondered if Ren could see it, or if he were in fact its propagator. In it the child of him — little Ren, gangly, thin with years of famine (fishribs at the bones, belly sunken), wild of hair, frigid pale — lay still upon a table beset by the sickly ritual things, roots and candles, scraps of relic, with the little mouth held open to receive sacraments by some contraption of bone. It all smacked of warfare legend. The contract of death rescinded. Planes without pilots and a bomb that could kill with only energy. Possession — troops rendered mindless. Troops rendered with one mind. 

“How old were you?” 

“Thirteen.” 

“He’s been in your head like that since you were thirteen?” 

“He was — since I can remember, he was always whispering. When I — he was everything left in me. He was God. But I was me in my head with him. In the end it was — it was my action.” 

Hux’s mother would have gone to her knees at Ren’s feet and kissed the hem of his robes. “What you did — to open a black door…”

“In the scripture of the Order it is the single greatest act that can be performed by man or woman. Especially the stolen ones that have been locked up by the Defector. But I am no longer as convinced of that as I once was.” 

That would not have pleased Hux’s mother, who feared her own loss of faith such it often kept her up at night, who had prayed over Hux sometimes while he feigned sleep, and who had died, when Hux was twenty-five, under the crushing weight of a decade and a half’s grief and blessings alike. And Hux had long thought, albeit with some chagrin, that the weight Ren carried around with himself was not dissimilar. 

He took one of Ren’s long hands in his own and traced the scars around his smooth white palm. Laced together their fingers and pulled Ren nearer to kiss the join of his neck and jaw then his mouth tasting his heat and his darkness and the metal (blood — his gift). Sucking poison, he thought, then it passed. Ren’s lips were so red and his skin so warm for someone who might’ve once been dead. And not for the first time in their eleven year acquaintance he wondered how much of Ren was Ren and how much of him was the priest. But then Ren pulled him closer with just his eyes. 

He lit the lantern by the side of the bed and cast the blankets in a tangle onto the floor. Traced his first two fingers up the bright blue vein in Ren’s thigh. No sound anymore but their breathing symphonic and the wind and the sound like the breeze blowing sand of their skin upon one another… Inside him later Hux felt Ren’s touch inside his mind, Ren’s mind moving with his as Ren’s body did, and he slipped inside it tidal with the rhythm of their sex. The spreading molten spark of Ren’s pleasure and beyond it his forever memory. The black spot of his grand forgetting a sore ache like a bad tooth. And deep at the center of his memory entire a wild and rabid voracious hunger such that he felt — Ren felt — Hux felt — collapsing in on himself like some great dying star, and impossibly, with a sharp cry, in the diamond compression of it he came. 

\--

In the morning — even before full light — Ren drug him from bed and they bathed and dressed and gathered their belongings and necessities for the trip in silence and walked in the cooling dew of the night through the silent streets to the black door. Ren was chewing his nails — Hux could hear it. They were let in by a trainee, this time unblind, who stared at Ren with something halfway between jealousy and condemnation as he removed his hood. The folds of dark fabric just barely concealed the hickey at his collar. Hux coughed nervously and Ren cast him a withering look. When they mounted up on the platform before Snoke’s cathedra Hux was seized with something straddling disgust and fear and he thought in the stillness he smelled rot and ash and metal or it was the lingering tendril of Ren’s dream —

“Father,” said Ren, inclining his head to kiss Snoke’s ring. When Hux followed suit he tried to think of anything but his liaisons abed with Ren — the skin, the touch in his mind — the wild and vivid encyclopedic memory of blood — and wasn't sure he succeeded. He could not look at Snoke’s face to check so he looked at Ren’s, which was composed and placid but tight at the jaw. 

“My child,” said Snoke, with a horrible gentleness. The shiver of revulsion went unbidden up Hux’s spine. “You bring me news of the girl.” 

“She has left the city,” said Hux, and he looked up before he could stop himself. Settled his gaze in the highest open light-streaming window so as not to commit the sin of looking Snoke in the face. In his periphery he could see the horrible face contort — and Ren’s wondering pressure in his head. “Sir,” Hux added as an platitude against his own ritual beheading. “We must leave here if we are to find her. We have secured valuable testimony that she is heading Northwards toward the Ridge.” 

The priest’s head turned quickly and Ren’s touch receded like a tide from Hux’s mind but not before Hux felt a ghost of his thrill of pain. “You have allowed her to elope from this jurisdiction?” 

“With all due respect sir. She has had many days of a head start and she has much sympathy among the rabble — ”

“You are no amateur search party after a lost child!” Snoke cried. “You are every eternity sanctified of this and every templum of the Order — you are an army of history itself and accompanying you sheriff if you have not yet realized it is the most powerful soldier of this entire faith.” 

“I have realized it,” said Hux. “But her power — ”

“Do not speak to me of her power. She has done dishonor to her gift.” 

“She is powerful,” said Ren in concession. His voice wavered. “But she is — untrained.” 

Like they were dogs who might piss indoors. Besides, if Ren was trained, Hux doubted the Order’s methodology. 

“He is imbued with power,” said Snoke. “To touch power is to oneself be power and indeed he has touched power. Do you not feel it, sheriff.” 

So perhaps he did know they had slept together. Hux didn’t respond but still he felt it when Snoke let Ren’s mind go from its vice grip. 

“You will find her and bring her to me. Whatever it takes.”

“Of course, sir.” 

“That is all,” said Snoke. “Sheriff, you may leave us.” 

He went with a curious reluctance and not a look spared over his own shoulder. Outside in the windblown dust he tried and failed to light a cigarette he’d stolen from Ren for several minutes until the door shut with another metallic thunk and the man himself emerged from the gloom tenderly adjusting his hood. “I got the keys to the speeder,” he said, voice soft and fragile. “It’s parked out past the berms.” 

“Are you alright?” 

“Head aches.” He brushed past Hux smelling like fresh lightning and in the tight streets Hux followed the tread of his boots to the Northeast square then out through the wreckage and hovels toward the great berms. 

“He is such a demagogue,” said Hux when Ren shortened his long strides in deference. “A loud and corrupted mouthpiece spouting wild drivel.” 

“He quite respects you if you must know,” said Ren, so softly it was nearly snatched in the breeze. 

“Bullshit.” 

“He thinks you would be stronger if you allowed yourself to believe.” 

“And what has your faith ever gotten you?” 

“Afterlife.” 

“I mean right now, tangibly.” 

“So do I, idiot.” He turned to Hux and shifted his robes and for a delirious moment Hux thought he might pull his cock out, but instead he showed the worn silvery hilt of his weapon. “That and this.” 

“You mean to say I could not wield that.” 

“Yes,” said Ren, “you could not. I am certain.” He turned away again. “He understands your mother and he sympathizes.” 

“I doubt he’s capable.” 

“There it is,” said Ren, like a child telling rhymes. “As though your doubting something made it impossible.” 

Hux would not goad him and thus did not speak. Ren kicked a hunk of something metal rusted. He hung his head such that Hux could tell it pained him. “Does he know about the two of us?” Hux asked finally. 

“He has long suspected.” 

“Long?” 

“He overestimates my — ”

“Fuck,” Hux said, thinking of Snoke carrying Ren’s limp thirteen-year-old corpse bodily from death. “Don’t tell me.” 

“Don’t be jealous.” 

He tried to tell Ren he was not jealous but found he could not summon the will to lie. Ren lengthened his strides again and his shoulders straightened just so beneath his outer wrappings, reluctantly victorious. 

The settlement at the Flats was protected on all sides from the howling night spirit of the desert wind by an artful collection of berms erected with stone and sand by ancient residents. Folk from the Flats, Hux included, rarely strayed outside. Sometimes people of relative influence sent carts down to the deep red canyon to the West for building stones or to scrap in the wreckage of the fallen aqueduct, and a few wizened ranchers ranged their mangy slat-ribbed cattle amidst the low scrub and mesquite spreading flatness and infinitude into the desert haze. Hux had been out there a few times in search of fugitives or to make a particularly illicit trade deal or, in the bloody blurred days after his father’s hanging, to drink himself into a stupor, pass out against the berms' great shady bulk, and wake with a slamming headache only to do it over again. 

Of course the Order had some metaphysical explanation for the berms' construction that Hux had never fully comprehended. They seemed to him purely functional for war as well as peacetime, as some provided panoramic lookouts upon the Flats and the surrounding desert. Indeed, even Ren said, “This is why the Defector could never come for this place.” He traced his long spidery fingers through the sand dislodging red rivulets. “It could only be destroyed from the inside.”

"Is that foretold as well?"

"No. Just obvious." 

When they came to the great curved concrete structure signaling the outer boundary of Hux’s jurisdiction Ren knelt with the billowing of his black robes and he removed his hood and the stiff salty breeze caught his hair. Hux had seen him pray before but hadn't known this structure was sacred. It was a lone strange monolith inscribed with esoteric symbology eroded with age he had always taken for a kind of road sign or welcome monument. In retrospect he should have suspected Ren would prostrate himself to it as he did to other strange things. As he had been doing to Hux lately, he thought, watching the spinal bones delineate against Ren’s clothing like some eroded volcanic feature upon the desert. 

It was not unlike the way he had laid himself out in the dust inside the ridge in the memory. Desperate and searching. As though he would press himself finally into the earth. He scrabbled his hands into the sand and then flattened the palms against the monument and his mouth was moving without sound and his eyes were open but unfocused and unseeing. 

"Why pray to that?" Hux asked when Ren stood again, brushing dust from his hands and the knees of his pants. 

“It’s carven with the eight tongues of the scripture," said Ren. Indeed when Hux leant close, squinting in the refracted sunlight, he saw the symbology varied somewhat from line to line in its shape and structure. “None of them have been read or spoken for a few thousand years. Until now if you can believe the girl.” 

When they walked around it Ren bowed his head murmuring words incomprehensible in deference but before they even came into its stretching cool shadow Hux could tell by the changed smell in the air that something was amiss. Indeed there on the desert-facing side of the monument was text in their own language and it seemingly rendered very recently in a screaming red pigment, bright and fresh as cadmium or blood — the four brilliant and simple symbols of the anti-trespassing warning adorning every secret gateway from a ranch gate to a sanctum door, text you learned to read in the Flats before you could read anything else — 

ONLY DEATH IS IN HERE

The pigment had dried in the wind and the heat and smudged against Hux’s finger like pollen or grease. Ren for his part had knelt once more to pray in rapid and hysterical decree. “Well, this explains why the shipment from the settlements hasn’t shown up,” said Hux. 

“Shut up,” said Ren, who looked up, and whose fucking tears tracked in the dust on his face. Marks like the scar — like the old ghost roadbeds in the desert leading to nonplaces. Thoroughly mythologized in dogma and urban legend alike. “Fuck, will you fucking shut up.” 

****\--

The Order’s prized speeder was decades old and peeling its ritual patterned paintjob, and it hadn’t been taken out in at least six months. The fine white dust had worked its way into the leather of the seat, which was bursting springs and padding. A little fiddling had it running, albeit so loudly they would have to forfeit any element of surprise. Ren hadn’t spoken since they left the monument and he had hooded himself again to either hide his face from the sun or to conceal his continued weeping. But he mounted up, and Hux climbed on behind him, securing the satchels of their belongings in the rope netting on each flank of the speeder, and they were off. For the first few minutes he thought it was probably highly unlikely they would make it more than a mile or two before the thing exploded — but before he knew it the Flats were growing more and more indistinct behind them in the rising heat of the day, they were still alive, and Hux’s thighs were numb from the vibration. The wind had blown the hood back again from Ren’s face; he had quit crying but there was a smooth runic salt track around his jaw which was set coldly and he was holding the controls of the speeder so tightly his knuckles seemed whiter even than usual. 

Hux began to entertain the notion perhaps this went deeper even than he had heretofore feared. Beyond the miracle of the girl’s mystical literacy and Ren’s contagious dreaming and Snoke’s alleged necromancy there had to be some deeper common thread. And now that it was getting tugged tight it was coming visible like a snake emerging from the sand. 

They pulled to the Northwest around the settlement into the fading of the day stopping only to quickly eat and change drivers before moving on again. They saw no track nor other sign of the girl and Ren still did not speak but at a stale and stagnant tinaja he cleaned his face and carefully gathered the vivid black mess of his hair into a knot at the back of his head. At sunset they stopped to make camp in a dry wash between dunes where they could have a smokeless fire without the light betraying their position to highwaymen or perhaps even to the girl. It would be another several days before they would be in sight of the royal road but the desert ways were dangerous and rife with superstition. 

Hux watched Ren across the new fire as he hunched low stoking it. The night was still warm enough he had left his full cloak in the net of the speeder and he wore only his loose training shirt and pants. Curly and fine tendrils of his hair had started coming loose from his topknot and his pale face was concerned about the mouth and the brow and he leaned frightfully close to the fire to light a cigarette. When the state of it satisfied him he sat back in the sand crossing his long legs and he reached into Hux’s pack for the corked jug of whiskey he had packed for the journey. 

Hux let him have a few sips before he went for it. “Are you not frightened,” he asked, feeling the thread of fear in himself as he voiced it. “In the chance that she is not mad and she can truly read — have you not considered — what exactly it says?” 

“I have considered,” Ren said, watching at the fire. His voice was soft from going unused all day and his shadow, lengthening in the sunset, was so stretched and skeletal Hux remembered his first impression of Ren, nightmare lich with cigarette in the sheriff’s precinct. “I have. It does not — escape me.” 

“But you believe.” 

“I am not prepared to not believe.” 

He knew it was like probing a wound and yet couldn’t help but continue. “Is it difficult?” 

“Yes. God — yes.” He rested his forehead in the palm of one hand. “It’s like — and you must hide this from the priest. It’s trying to pull itself out from under my skin.” 

“What is?” 

“All my trick pieces,” said Ren, as though it explained everything. “I owe my life — at least I owe this breathing to it. But I know — it knows that now I doubt it. That in fact I have doubted it for some time.” 

Hux thought of the lovely archaic tapestry of Ren’s scars with some sharp edge of sympathy or nausea through his gut like sheet lightning. “All your surgical — ”

“I do not speak of this,” said Ren miserably. 

“Right.” 

“I will tell you that to hold myself together has become increasingly difficult. It was a poor time to — ” He could not voice it so he showed Hux, bizarrely, his memory of their chastest kiss. “I do not regret it. But it is indicative — ” 

“You have not felt like yourself.” 

He peered into Hux’s eye and nodded solemnly. “It is why — I can’t not believe. It’s all that I am.” 

Something flashed through all of Hux’s blood like the succumbing jolt of some drug — like falling in and sinking. Sinking to the bottom of it and it was warm, and it was a soft static hum in his mind. 

“What is it — Ren. What happened to make you doubt?” 

“I could show you.” 

“Please do.” 

“You would — Hux.” The hand on his forehead he shifted to cover his eyes. “Hux, when you find out — ”

“I already doubt.” 

“It’s worse than that.” 

“Does it prove it?” 

“It proves _something_.” 

They watched at each other across the fire. The night chill was coming from the East with the gathering of the night darkness. “Go ahead and show me,” said Hux, proud that his voice didn’t waver. 

There was no ceremony. Again he found himself shoved headlong into Ren’s memory and Rey with her wild-thing hair and eyes and the shallow screaming of her weapon and this time he felt the sharp intrusion inside Ren’s mind when she showed him what she had come to understand. That she had woken from strange and shuffled dreaming in the wee hours of the night and she had gone as if summoned to the library sanctum and she had taken down scripture just to pray. And that she had never dared before to so much as touch the books but she had come to loathe Snoke (here, ghost fragments of memories she snatched away from Ren and Ren snatched away from Hux such that just the impressions of them [his hand upon her jaw] [his hand upon Ren’s jaw] [gnarled thumb that held a soft red mouth open by the velvet tongue] [the darkness — the pitchy feeling darkness for the eyes were bound —] flashed before Hux’s mind’s eye) and as such she had begun to question her faith and now she sought solace. And that it was entirely by accident she swore and promised on her own life it was entirely by accident that she had opened the book at all. And it was entirely by accident she swore she swore her sincerity like some lightning bolt in Ren’s mind in Hux’s mind that she began to read it. And it said: 

_This library room was constructed in 2115 as part of a series of messages regarding the purpose of this site and others like it. In conjunction with the standing stones, outer berms, and “black hole” monument it is intended to mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes. This is Book 1 of a collection of literature created to help you understand the meaning of this site and its attendant danger._

_The area is 1.61 by 1.43 kilometers (or 1 mile by .9 miles or about 905 times the height of an average full-grown male human) and the buried waste is .6 kilometers (580 meters) down. For more maps and diagrams of the site see Book 2._

_This place was chosen to put the dangerous material far away from people. When this site was closed in 2115 it was 42 kilometers from the town of Carlsbad, New Mexico, United States of America. For more information about American history and geography see Book 3._

_The rock and water in this area may not look, feel, or smell unusual but may be poisoned by radioactive wastes. Radioactivity can be spread from poisoned materials like a contagion. When radioactive matter decays, it gives off invisible energy that can destroy or damage people, animals, and plants. The damage is to the body and it can kill. There are varying levels of severity of radiation poisoning. For more information about radiation sickness see Book 4._

_There are many reasons why humans created radioactive material. As such, this is one of many places around the world where radioactive material has been buried. For more information about the uses of radioactive material, and the locations of other burial sites, see Book 5._

_Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do anything that will change the rocks or water in this area. Do not settle or meet on the site. Do not farm or ranch, or use in any way the water within the outer berms. Do not destroy the markers or the contents of this library._

_The marking system that surrounds this place has been designed to last 10,000 years. If the text of these materials is difficult to read, add new markers in longer-lasting materials in languages that you speak. This site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) when it was closed in 2115._

Hux was still half in Ren’s memory and half in Rey’s when Ren spoke (from himself, of himself, shaking him) — “You see now that everything sacred is in fact profane.” 

The fire had died; it was naught now but soft white ash to match the pale chill of the dusk. Across from him Ren’s face was whiter even than usual and the strange starmap of his birthmarks vivid as bloodspatter. “Everything — ” 

It came back up like something he had swallowed and he stood just quick enough — head spinning — to turn away from Ren and bend double to vomit. 

“It is all sickness,” Ren said from behind him. The color had drained even from his voice. “So it is in fact not that we must suffer for our gift but all the gifted and the blessed are sick to dying and have been dying since we were born.” 

“We’ve all been dying since we were born,” Hux choked. 

“Not so young or so horrible.” 

“Yes young.” He could feel his own voice rising and sharpening in his throat with some hot thing swarming in his mouth and behind his eyes. “Yes so young and yes so horrible, did you not hear — ” He had to stop and sit again and push the heels of his hands into his eyes lest he weep more out of confusion than fear or shock or so he told himself. “Do you not see, we have all been eating it — you have been worshipping — you have been _killing_ in service of poison since you were a child.” 

For the first time Hux thought he saw upon Ren’s face a purely human wishful tired sort of madness. “Do you think it doesn't — that I don’t understand?” 

Hux thought of his mother and felt another pass of nausea make a fist in his gut. “It’s death in a — God, death in a metal box. A thousand metal boxes. Death boxed up by those that it killed.” 

“Unboxed by the same,” said Ren. 

“Unboxed by the — it killed you and then it woke you back up and you did not suspect?” 

The memory unbidden was like nearly having drowned and being shoved underwater again — he was waking from no dreaming in a shaft of pale light in a big black room because he could not breathe — and he pulled what seemed like miles of mesquite and bright fabric and herbs interwoven from his mouth and his throat and at the end of the strand he vomited — and finally with his breath at last caught like a slippery fish he took macabre inventory of his body as he had done before (memory snatched [the rabid hunger, and the rats] and drowned again within himself) — the palms of his hands were red and upon them the skin was tender and attached here and there with swollen black knots and with cauterized ridges — and elsewhere on his body he was stitched up like a doll poorly repaired with mismatched threads — and around him on the bed in the darkness were ritual things the like of which he had never before seen: misshapen hunks of metal and lumpen yellow stones and satchels of mysterious herbs and flowers and fossils in rock and bits of polished stone — and when he reached for his gift inside his mind he found it and the thing that directed it closer now than they had ever been — 

He wrenched himself free like from quicksand and nearly puked again. Residual deathness. “Sorry,” Ren said coldly, across the ashes of the fire, not meaning it. 

If he were not so sick with horror he may have taken a moment to feel vindicated for his unbelieving. “Fuck you,” he said, “Ren, God, fuck you.” 

“You asked to see it!” 

“I meant the fucking — the second one.” 

Ren was prodding at the ashes of the fire with a stick. “It gets worse after that,” he mumbled, mostly to himself. 

“Don’t you fucking dare pretend only you have ever suffered.” 

He stood and turned his back upon Ren and the dead fire and walked four steps and puked again. Knelt and took and held very deep breaths to keep from weeping — counted them at even intervals much as he had to calm himself a decade previous. When it was full dark he could see from the spread of golden light that Ren had built the fire back up, small and banked and smokeless, and up to it he held his spidery hands as though he could ever succeed in warming them. 

To pity him will be the death of you, Hux thought. You both have enough pity for yourselves without each other. 

And then because he couldn’t keep from it: You are thinking of the starving possessed child before the black door. Not him — not the man of him who knew — who let the horsemen loose upon the desert. 

Finally later after he had come back to the fire — to Ren’s side — the purest, the most vital distilled certainty of it all: none of it matters — nothing matters. Death already put a brood somewhere in you. A brood already even now spreading and subdividing like maggots upon a carcass. 

They shared Ren’s last cigarette — sitting so their arms touched — and Hux found he itched to take Ren’s clothes off and do nothing more erotic than palpate thoroughly each old scar. But knowing Ren it was likely to get him off and Hux wasn’t sure that was in the slightest his intention. 

“So she is right,” Hux said finally. “Can’t you feel it? Her sincerity?” 

“She is right. But we need to fetch her and bring her back to the Flats or Snoke will kill us both.” He sighed. “I asked him not to embroil you in this but he thought it might help you reconsider your heathenry.”

Hux felt the same anger bubbling up like loosed oil from the sand. He held the cigarette and entertained the notion, not for the first time, of putting it out against the thigh of Ren’s black pants. “You’ve never meant a single fucking apology you've given me in our eleven year acquaintance.” 

“This one I mean.” 

“So you would’ve preferred I — kept living my life, sleeping eating drinking that stuff until I got blessed and died.” 

“I would’ve preferred we never met each other if it would keep you from this.” 

His voice was tight and he would not look at Hux. “Sweet of you,” Hux said. “I’ll think about it during either my hanging or my slow consumption by blessings.” 

“You won’t be hanged,” said Ren. “I’ll shoot the rope like in the old legends. Everything he ever gave me he tried to take away again in about thirty seconds. My fucking life included. But he will not have this. I promise.” 

“You promise.”

“Have I ever broken a promise to you before.” 

He couldn’t recall Ren ever having made a promise to him before. “I suppose you want a blowjob for that.” 

Ren’s sulk was cartoonish. “Fuck you, Hux.”

It was funny how whenever Ren attempted emotional vulnerability Hux wanted to hurt him more. It was like he’d rolled over and showed his tender white belly and his throat and the skin there was very bruised and thin. He thought about laying Ren out in the sand like a big lanky feast and devouring him so after a little while he did. There was so much strangeness in there, Hux thought, like in the dream, it was a long way down and inside it there was all strangeness. Everything was dark and it was vibrating and there was a heart beating very fast in his ears. 

The sun was so fully set the last dregs of light were like a thick haze. Hux was in Ren’s lap, and underneath him he could feel Ren’s bones, and all the hollowness in Ren’s body, a very fragile false skin of earth to walk on, and Ren’s strange hands were around his ribcage so as they could nearly span him entire. Hux rocked; Ren shook like he was in a fever. He shoved up and Hux screamed. Somewhere dissolving in fog like a spring duststorm he resented that he had offered Ren this at all to begin with; his cock was ridiculous and it hurt, a great sore expanding hurt like the red-hot searing thing at the center of the universe, at the beginning and at the very end of time — but with it and because of it he lived. That was the pinpoint of it and it was consciousness a mile wide. In the desert — in the whole sick poison world of nothing still he lived. 

When he was close he took a fistful of Ren’s hair and pulled his head back to show his neck. The free hand he wrapped from the point of Ren’s chin to his breastbone and none too gently he pressed inward. Underneath him he could feel Ren panting. His cold spidery hands had moved to Hux’s belly and the small of his back. 

\--

He understood this time it was his own dream but it was sticky as tar and he couldn’t climb out of it. He was walking in the Flats in the slum maze but now he could feel that thing come shaking up out of the earth. Pure and potent thick chemical nausea. He walked in the darkness and in his hand he held his gun and the streets were silent but still he observed carefully around each corner. And then he felt that red-hot fishhook in his mind that was Ren’s vivid will. 

In the darkness in the square he knew the tableau like his own scripture for the faces artfully upturned and the swarming field of light, crystalline astral glow, Ren’s battered false youth and his father’s blessed brokenness and their zealotry and their madness alike palpable like a bad wind… This time it was different because Ren knelt with his face pressed up at the business end of the weapon which was held tightly in the gnarled and tightly grasping hands of Hux’s father. The half-live frozen ghost of Hux’s father, for the skin had decayed partway from the bones and the shattered disfunction of his neck and his backbone was bruised and bent in on itself like some horrible insectoid creature escaped from the laboratory of a haunted scientist. 

He was imperious over the false child that was Ren like Damocles’ sword. He was that thing, and Hux saw it in the dream because he wouldn’t waking. Fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers' sick fathers who sought sovereignty at any cost. Who sought to perform arbitrage on life and on death. As though all possession were not temporary. As though all having did not come with the taking away. As though there were ever any grasp that was not slippery. As though there were ever any true forfeiture. Any true surrender or any true victory or any true defeat. 

As though he ever would be anything but what the earth would not yet swallow. As though he wouldn’t ever rot. As though any sovereignty could be forever. As though anything that ever had been buried could really stay there. 

\--

Against the white dawn sky and the distant hills Ren’s narrow face and wild hair hovered for he had knelt at the side of Hux’s bedroll. 

“You do know,” he said. But then he stopped, as though he had said all he needed. 

“I do know what.” 

“That was when — well. Between that night and his hanging. When I wanted you for the first time.” 

“God,” said Hux, “on the two worst days of my life? Until yesterday?” 

Ren looked up into the hills like toward some holy place from which he could draw wisdom. “It was like something sucked everything out of you but your desperation and your ambition.” 

“ _God_ ,” Hux said again, sitting up, lightheaded with hunger, wondering to whom he even appealed, “have you no — you’re like a succubus. Drinking fucking misery. As though you didn’t already have enough of your own.” 

“Not your misery,” said Ren. He sat back on his heels. He was trying to be unoffended but his face had twisted. “How strong you were. In your extremity. Everything was gone — every certainty in your life. But you did not forfeit what you wanted. Nor your power. I figured I admired you very much. But later I thought about it and I realized I loved you.” 

“You are so fucked up.” 

“I know.” He smiled, a quick lightning flash of teeth, like a hungry animal. “As are you. Birds of a feather.” 

\--

The speeder gave out just past midday which was fine by Hux because straddling it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. He had tried to stand only to find himself struck head-on by three plump and crunching cicadas before he gave up. Ren was biting his nails though they were blackened about the pale beds with oil and dust so desperate was he for a cigarette. They took turns tinkering with the guts of the speeder and resting in the shade it threw off, watching at the heat rising from the sand and the black birds circling amidst the blue-distant landforms, buttes and mesas with a thousand different names, spreading across the endless rolling mesquite flat. No longer could Hux see the city nor the massive monument of the templum though he knew it was to the Southeast. Sometimes on the darkest nights he knew the Order would set a bonfire on the roof of the templum so that supply trains on the desert would not lose their way. But as the light faded it became clear this was not to be one of those nights. 

“Any progress,” he asked Ren when he rose to start collecting whatever firewood he could scavenge. 

“None.” Ren had abandoned, finally, most of his concealing layers and he sweat and his sunburnt skin was patterned with dark oil and smears of rust and his hands were filthy and with them he had brushed his hair from his face and he looked utterly not like one of Snoke’s but rather like the mechanics who would repair and ready the supply trains’ wagons and speeders at the shop around the corner from where Hux had grown up. Watching them from the well across the street where he was obliged to do his parents’ laundry had constituted young Hux’s sexual awakening. “What?” Ren asked, and Hux realized he was staring. 

Certainly the truth wasn't edifying. So Hux said, “You have shit on your face.” 

Ren pouted. “I can tell I do.” 

“You look like one of those roughs who would fix up the supply trains on the East wall.”

Perhaps Ren was blushing or it was just his sunburn. He closed up the rusting door concealing the guts of the speeder and sat in the sand and undid his boots stretching his long legs out before him in the dust. His bare feet were delicate and the ankles were bony and there were a few ink marks near his heel illegible and fading and stretched with time. “Is this some sexual fantasy of yours,” Ren asked. There was a tiny smile folding his soft red mouth and in the spreading golden light he looked very young. 

Hux thought, do not. Do not fucking go there. The world is not changed because he was inside you. “It’s not,” he said. 

He walked over the dunes toward the sunset searching firewood and he was so focused on his quest for it he didn’t notice he was not alone until he stepped into the spreading stretching black shadow. And as he looked up with dread sinking slowly into his stomach the form of it shifted and vibrated and he saw emblazoned against the dissolving red spectre of the sun was the girl and she held her weapon in a practiced warrior form and perhaps it was she who picked the wind up like a rear guard to lift dust around her pale clothing. 

With a free hand she lifted her sun goggles from her face. She was thin and pretty and strange and she was stronger than before, it was in her face. She was not frightened. Her weapon was not unlike Ren's but its light was a soft pale blue and it lacked the crossguard and it did not spit sparks off as Ren’s did and it was so light it caused her no trouble even slight as she was to hold it assuredly in one slender hand which was bound with ragged fabric. She was alone in the desert but it was of no trouble to her because she had always been at least a little alone in the desert and now she understood she was a piece of it and it would not harm her. “Sheriff,” she said. He knew her voice from Ren’s memory, her lilting accent (her provenance otherplace) and her wild eyes ringed golden, and when he thought of Ren he felt suddenly a shocked touch inside his mind like the moment of having dropped something valuable. She must have sensed it too, for her pale brow furrowed. “Hold still for me for just a moment.” 

Like a fool he managed to get himself halfway turned around in desperate search for Ren before his whole self took heed of her and he froze. It felt very much like being stuck back in that morning’s dream. 

“I won’t hurt you,” said the girl. She was very close to him now and indeed in her delicate mouth was a soft friendly smile. “I know you believe me. But we need to get him here quickly, don’t we?” 

Carefully she lifted her weapon and she held the point of it to Hux’s throat. He could feel her touch in his mind — _still — still — still —_ and her sending to Ren, the golden tendril of thought, the endless wellspring of her power, deep and silent and cunning, power drawn out of death, power she had divorced from it into herself — 

As soon as the black bruiselike shadow of Ren mounted the closest dune she drew him to her with her mind such as that his bare toes dragged in the sand a pattern like the track of some strange animal. His hair floated static around his head like the dark halo of a drowned suicide and his face was caught in an expression of determination and shock and fear that made something flip in Hux’s stomach and he had not even attempted to draw his weapon, which was holstered at his belt. 

Slowly the girl moved the weapon from Hux’s throat and still he could not move. She eyed Ren as if he were an insect she held aloft to the sun to inspect. When she spoke it was calm and even. “I told you if I saw you again and you were still his dog I would kill you, Ben.” 

At first Hux thought she had called him Ren but she had not. She lifted him carefully a foot or so higher and Hux saw his eyes were wide with horror and his skin livid beneath the smudges of oil and rust and there were cords standing out in his long neck and his teeth were tightly clenched. 

“Do not doubt me,” she said. She took a step to the south and she dragged her weapon in the dust and behind her the sand melted into glowing white-hot glass. Her conviction was like a blood covenant. “You can tell I mean what I say. And I can tell what's inside you. And I can tell your cowardice.” When she stood at an angle to the sun she stopped and watched them. Ren floating and Hux frozen. Arranged in a pretty tableau like doomed gods of myth. She still had her delicate small smile sitting in her mouth. “I’m going to take apart all this false world. And you need to pick whatever piece of your heart means most to you.” 

She let Ren go and he collapsed in a heap to the ground. When she came closer she turned him on his back with the toe of her shoe like a dancer and Hux saw he was unconscious — a sprawling black nothingness, void space sucking into the desert. The sunset light now was a pale dust lavender upon his face and the girl’s as beside him she knelt, closing her weapon, pushing Ren’s filthy hair back from his forehead behind his ear. 

“I’m going onward,” she said to Hux. “Don’t come after me. I don’t suppose he has cigarettes.” 

She lifted whatever inhibitor she’d put down on him just enough that he could speak. “He’s out,” he said, voice wrestled out like through sticky toffee. Then, not sure why, “He’s been chewing his nails.” 

She looked up and very sadly she smiled. Then the world very quickly lost color and definition. 

\--

When he woke his mouth was full of dust and at first he thought something was wrong with his eyes until in his periphery he noticed there was a tiny glimmer of light from beneath what must have been a door. His back ached and when he touched his temple his fingers came away sticky and when he could collect himself he tried to locate the walls on every side of himself but could not. And the place from whence the light came was too narrow even to press a fingernail beneath. 

He wondered where he had been brought and reasoned likely it was some desert hideaway of hardscrabble defectors who would turn him loose as soon as they realized he had no devotion to the Order and that he was in fact more than willing to himself defect with all his knowledge of Snoke’s proceedings, etc. He pressed his temple again and this time felt the bruise and the lightning flash of pain before his eyelids and it was then that he heard the sound of keys in the door. 

He was too disoriented in the darkness to stand but he drew from the sound and was sitting in the floor as such when the light screamed through his brain like a blunt knife. When he recovered his vision enough he saw the light was held like some ritual flame aloft above a familiar skeletal hand. 

Ren had his hood up but beneath it the goldenness of his light cast his face sharply, and his hands were tightly bandaged, and his eyes were so black, like oil that seeped up out of the earth after it shook. At first Hux wondered what was happening and then everything tied together ouroboros inside his mind and he understood — with another shock not unlike lightning. Like a stone falling from a height into his stomach, and in his ears he heard his heart skip, and he tasted in the air suddenly the strange metallic trembling on the back of his tongue, the half-life haze of the stuff rising ever from the earth from where it was buried beneath them both even now never dead inside the reliquary… 

He turned to his side and vomited acid and he felt Ren take a step toward him — the stillness in that room displaced by his robes — and reached, on instinct, for his blaster at his belt, but of course it had been taken from him. 

“How long,” he said, trying for mildness, though his voice cracked. 

“Since always,” said Ren. He rocked back and forth on the heels of his boots. “Seven thousand years, glory be.”

“You know what the fuck I mean, Ren.” 

He crouched and the light came with him and he shifted his hood back from his face and there was some fervor of static in his wild hair and in his eyes like the false life shoved back in him by the puppeteer. “I said, since always. Attachments are futile. Do you see? There can only be one desire.” He pressed his free hand to the earth. There was blood and worse shoving at the white wrapping of the bandages. “Can you feel it?” 

So help him he was thinking of Ren asleep on his chest and how he had carded his own hand through Ren’s hair. How the back of Ren’s neck was warm and the bones of his spine and how he had been thinking, perhaps there is still some self to him yet salvageable with some elbow grease. “Yes.” 

“You’d be wise to take your faith when he brings it to you.” 

“Fuck you.” 

“Likewise.” He left the light floating to draw from the pocket of his robes his cigarette case and his book of matches. 

“Ren. You _showed_ me your — ” 

“I did have doubt. I do not deny. My master saw fit to remind me of the power to be found in darkness.” 

“Did all this ease your fucking mind.” 

“Yes.” 

“How?” 

“I know this is death.” He pressed his palm to the earth again and this time tightened his hand and his ragged fingernails scraped the stone beneath. “But so am I. And so have we been since we filled and buried the reliquaries.” 

“So you really are a lich.” 

“Yes,” said Ren, “inasmuch as I was even before I died and so are we all. We were put on this earth each of us to eat up life until we die, were we not? I believe again and so will you before the end.” 

It was not entirely surprising but still startled him like a blaster bolt through his gut such that he felt dizzy with the sudden shock of fear. “The end?” 

“Aboveground they are building the gallows. A hanging always quiets the rabble. You understand.” Again he set to rocking on his heels bracing his hand against the ground and the light fluttered around his head like some strange bird and with his eyes shut he looked like an oracle in the throes of ecstasy. As he often had in Hux’s bed all too lately to have been staticked out of memory. 

“You showed me — ” said Hux again, but he could not finish. 

“I did care for you,” said Ren abruptly. “But I cannot.” 

“So you faked it.” 

“Not entirely.” He took a drag from his cigarette and let the smoke hover folding like thunderclouds in the stillness. “For a while I thought you were my reward for all my suffering. But I see now you were just a test. It was no hardship, which is my failing, to draw on — the thing I used to be before I was Ren. Like memory or — more like very old sort of fever dreams.” 

“You’re truly mad.” 

“Yes, I know that. As are we all. As we have always been, amen.” 

“Stop making this all about — this fucking place.” 

Ren’s face twisted. “Everything is. Do you not understand? This is the center of the very world.” 

“This is unbeing,” said Hux, “this is like, a big black void.” 

“Yes,” said Ren, and he sounded like he did when Hux fucked him right (Ren’s back against his chest and Ren’s head on his shoulder and his mouth open and his body — Hux’s hand was spread open across his belly, connecting the freckles and the old scars, and he was tight but also yielding and he was blood-warm and trembling and he was lovely and they were alone together in the world with their knowledge), “yes, yes, but that does not mean it is not everything.” 

When he rose he left a skin canteen and a few cigarettes and half the book of matches. He raised his hood again about his tangled hair and Hux saw he carried no weapon and he stood so tenderly he must have been in pain. 

“Are you going to keep your promise to me,” Hux said, almost without meaning to, feeling possessed by fear. Ren turned the black void at his face to him for a moment then he disappeared again with the light into the room beyond and sealed once more the darkness. 

\--

Snoke came next, accompanied by another pale trainee, with a dinner of porridge and a cup of discolored water. He eyed with an abstract concern Ren’s canteen which Hux had not touched despite his thirst. “Sheriff,” he said. 

“Sir,” said Hux, and he tried to unlearn all his manners as quickly as he could, and he looked Snoke in the face. The trainee beside him could not hide an expression of shock but the man himself met Hux’s gaze with deep-set dark eyes burning in the their sockets — deep black eyes like wounds. Black as some infernal cavern into death itself — black as oil sludge and flaming with their zealotry like a pass of lightning. One was cut through by a deep scar that passed about the skull in a great rift like the river canyon to the East. And the skin was a pale gray slipping like cloth from the bone. Mouth like a slash of black stone — nose cut like a snake’s. He looked more like a lich than Ren did and Hux wondered if he too had been summoned back from ritual death by some ancient ur-priest whose bones were interred in a reliquary alongside the others. “Have you someone in mind to assume my sheriffing duties.” 

“Kylo Ren has declared his eligibility.” Hux laughed, a hoarse bark, unbidden. “You may understand I am reluctant to offer him such responsibility at present. He is still — coming back to his faith. After the interlocutor.” Smoke coughed, pressing a fist to his lips. “Rest assured it will be a priest of the Order.” 

“Right.” 

“I am rather accomplished at the coup d’etat, Brendol. As Ren may have — shown you.” 

He ignored what he understood to be Snoke’s attempt at goading him. “When’s my hanging.” 

“Tomorrow,” said Snoke. “Provided they can construct the gallows with such alacrity. I am sure you understand my sentiment that it is best to wrap up this complete fiasco as quickly as possible.” 

He did not ask after Ren though he wanted to. “Certainly.” 

“I’ve come to offer you an opportunity to embrace your faith at the last,” said Snoke. “Your father took it, eleven years ago, from me and Ren.” 

“What does it entail.” 

Snoke’s young attendant held out in a soft white palm a tiny fragment of some rusted metallic cut in a nearly perfect circle and carven with the six even rays around the central sun — the glyph for faith, the symbol of the Order. In Rey’s memory, the mark that indicated the presence of the stuff of death. The tattoo amongst the shifting bone and muscle and skin on Ren’s back. “I won’t take it,” said Hux. 

“I understand why you have chosen heathenry but it won’t get you far after your death.” 

“This is death,” said Hux, “don’t you get it? That sign means death; I won’t take it.” 

The attendant closed their small white hand into a fist again about the tiny symbol. They were pretty and young and genderless in white robes, hair shaven, one blessed eye cloudy and unseeing. Carefully, deferentially, they looked to Snoke, toward his chin. Once one of them had been Rey and another had been Ren. Perhaps one day this child too would prove an agent greater than itself. Of jealousy, righteousness — of grief and truth and betrayal. Of history — of everything contained underground in metallics. 

“She is mad,” Snoke reminded him. The voice was scraped so raw with sickness and age that the anger in it was like a ghost — a single pale thread stretched near to breaking. “She has started this contagion to subvert and destroy all we have built.” 

“I won’t take it,” said Hux once more. “Please leave me.” 

Snoke and the attendant left and the child turned to spare a look Hux could not decipher. He wondered, trying to quash the upswell of concern, what Snoke had done to Ren, with whom he certainly could not be pleased. Before he could chase it off the image entered his mind, Snoke crushing Ren’s long strange skeletal hands between two heavy stones. Between two rolling drums of smoking sick reliquary. He wondered, nonsensically, if Ren would ever die or if he even wanted to. 

\--

Food was brought to him that he did not eat. It was a thick white gruel conveyed forth in the metallic shell of something and hunks of roasted agave that were blackened and had been pressed already for mezcal. He slept in fits and starts and dreamed he was making love with Ren and woke and punched the wall. He regretted it later when he couldn’t curl his fist. 

At his father’s hanging, Ren was there, Hux recalled. He was hooded in his finery but he was there and Hux hated him desperately inasmuch as he could summon any feeling at all and beside him his mother was crying. She let up this wild sobbing decree to the sky spiraling like smoke. Hux’s drunk was going out on him and the hangover creeping up like some feral ivy. And across the square from the gallows Ren was there with a cadre of priests and trainees perhaps including the little girl, Rey; she would not yet have been ten years old. 

He had seen folk hanged — he was a sheriff in the saltlands. Folk hanged. In the autumn the birds from the Northlands passed over in search of Southerly roost pursuing conjectural winds on a route unchanged for millennia. His father had been assisted up the gallows by the hangman, who had lived four doors down on the East wall with his young wife and his children, one of whom was so blessed she had never risen from bed, and she had never spoken, but she wrote poetry. Sometimes folk would throw rotten things upon the gallows toward the condemned but on this occasion they were still for they knew not what exactly to do and they feared mistreading before the eyes of the templum. Some of them looked at Hux and his mother, or they wanted to but they could not summon the daring. As though the blessing of madness was hereditary and catching. 

It seemed to Hux his father’s possessor was an almost living madness and in that perhaps it was not unlike Ren’s. And he wondered if the night they caught his father Ren had not already seen that one day they would be lovers. That they would be lovers and that this fiasco would happen afterwards though perhaps that should have all along been obvious. In fact perhaps whenever Ren looked at him with that face that suggested he knew something Hux didn’t, perhaps that thing he’d known had been this. Perhaps he had been trying to say all along, can’t you see? Run from me now while you still can. 

\--

It was a bright blue day, and he was hungry, and his sunburn ached under his skin. His wrists were bound, as if it mattered. He was escorted from the darkness by two of Snoke’s foresworn — they were hooded in pale robes and their hands were frigid cold — though the priest himself was nowhere to be seen. And nor, he noticed, hardly heartened by it, was Ren. 

The streets were full and swarming. The rabble were held back from the gallows by more initiates and they were silent but when Hux’s escorts drug him past some of them turned to one another and whispered. They were all blessed and he understood — for he himself was blessed to death — if it was not visible on the surface it was serpentine underneath. A wind current that blew the distant clouds. The strange gyres that the birds twisted on when they sought below upon the topographic earth for prey and for the dying. 

Death’s brood, underground. Death’s brood seeping up into all things. He thought he felt it; it came up through his boots. Like blood — like oil pressing together under the weight of years. As though through extended, inadvisable, and purely naked exposure he’d been accidentally gifted with Ren’s misguided overfeeling. His knack for reading the things he wanted to be there and nothing else. His surface-skimming — his holy reductionism. His hollowness. His void. 

This living was but a stage of death, he thought. That must have been what the forefathers had intended. And the rope was strung carefully around his neck with a strange and eerie and purely horrible tenderness. He looked into the blind eyes of the initiates beside him with iris and pupil spreading silver white like distant rain. 

He tried to speak but he could not. They were holding his voice. At the last he reached out wildly inside his head into the nothingness. And at the very distant heart of everything the hand that clasped his was cold and strange. 

Then it happened. 

\--

He was shoving with all his might at the great black door but it wouldn’t open. There was a thin static hum in his mind — an impression of some vivid will — and a pale red light that hovered and seared in the darkness behind his eyes. 

“Let’s go,” someone was saying, and their voice was soft but urgent, because there was along way now to go before they slept, “let’s go, come on, wake up, wake up.”

\--

**Author's Note:**

> currently -- the US is burying its nuclear and chemical waste underground outside carlsbad, new mexico, in the [waste isolation pilot plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant). scientists of numerous backgrounds have met multiple times to discuss how to mark this site to warn future people living in the NM desert to keep away from the site. [these notes](http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm) from one such meeting remain one of the most important and fascinating things i've ever read. i've always wanted to write a story taking place in a world very far removed from this -- and here it is!  
> quotes from the text of the sacred books are all pretty much co-opted from the above link with some editing / extension.  
> massive thanks be due to [imochan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan), kylux enthusiast and literal nuclear art historian, for helping conceptualize this, and to [llyn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/llyn/pseuds/llyn), for her lifesaving beta read. also, incredible screamingly joyous shout out to [moscca](http://moscca.tumblr.com/post/147969894461/finally-uploaded-some-sketches-i-did-after-reading) for the incredible art!!


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